Oh. So just build it with someone else’s money on someone else’s land somewhere else and call it “our” “solution.” Right, got it.
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I’m thinking of one of LA’s councilmembers, Mike Bonin. The city of Venice is in his district. It always had a significant homeless problem, but much more so during the pandemic. In the first two years of the pandemic, he was perceived as doing nothing about it. If I remember, he made the point that he wasn’t allowed to move someone unless there was someplace they could go, and the shelter system was seriously impacted by Covid. I don’t know what the status of funding for housing was at the time.
Bonin’s Democratic base turned on him and he’s not running for re-election.
I don’t know what he could have done that would have been legal, humane, and also satisfying to his constituents who may have objected to an encampment in front of their house. In the past year, there have been projects for building or repurposing housing for the homeless population. City employees and volunteers have been going to the encampments and seeing, first, who was willing to be moved. Eventually, if there is enough housing, they will be legally allowed to tell the homeless that they can’t stay in certain places, because they’ll have alternative spots for them. One hopes there will be medical and social services and security. All of which is, of course, very expensive.
And of course there are inevitable complaints about the cost and perceived luxury of these tiny homes.
I suppose Bonin did the right thing and, as a result, will now go find a different job. The Venetians I know felt he prioritized the homeless populations’ needs ahead of theirs and responded negatively. I would be interested in knowing what the commenters here feel a politician, whose jobs depend on their voters’ approval, should do in the short term between elections, as the gears of even the bluest government turn slowly to fund, build, and staff emergency or interim housing.
Also, I don’t think anyone is proposing that the unhoused population should be “concentrated” in “camps” far from population centers, and then prevented from leaving that facility. If they are proposing that, I’d love to know. Anyway, I’d love to hear ideas for satisfying the housed residents, voters, as well as being humane and lawful toward the unhoused residents.
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Sure, fine. But those vacant homes are owned. How should the owners be compensated? The problem isn’t lack of buildings, it’s the lack of funding to acquire those buildings. Also, isn’t the complaint in this article that they propose booting the unhoused from Malibu? Would you be OK with housing them, somehow, in a vacant home in Peoria? And if you are okay with displacing them to where the homes are, you still haven’t said how you’d pay for the home.
If the cartoon claimed that there are millions of vacant homes that nobody owned, that would be an interesting point. But I don’t think that’s the case.
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I certainly don’t have any issue with these temporary accommodations being overly luxurious, but there is a legitimate complaint to make about the cost. Not because we shouldn’t spend the money (we absolutely should, and more!) but because it really looks like the money is somehow being spent extremely inefficiently and we should be able to house many more people in dignity for the same expenditure.
The tiny homes referenced in this article are extremely small and simple, basically garden sheds that don’t even include plumbing. It’s also a lousy freeway-adjacent location. Yet for the same cost we could pay the mortgages for real homes instead.
I don’t know how this possibly ended up being such an expensive project but there’s got to be a lot of ways to get much more bang-for-the-buck than this.
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Haven’t read it, and you’re right! That seems egregious. Note that the cost includes “running the site”, something that would not be included in a purchased house, regardless of price. It’s not really comparable. I imagine that running the site includes social and medical and security services.
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I live someplace similar and that’s one of the more common attitudes. A common lament I hear is “The mainland ships their homeless here”.
I don’t know what the answer is and I don’t think there are any easy answers. I don’t think “shipping them some place else” is acceptable.
I think the biggest obstacle is treating all homeless as one homogenous group.
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A lot of cities paid hotels (empty, because pandemic) to house homeless during the worst of COVID.
Others have construed housing right in downtown areas. It’s expensive (since it’s got to be up to a consistent safety standard), but it’s better than shipping people off to, basically, anywhere else.
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That movie really doesn’t like cops. By telling the truth.
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Those millions of homes were made vacant after the housing bubble ripoff thievery by the lending banks that made billions off people who couldn’t pay in the long run and then were made homeless after foreclosure. And don’t forget corporations moving all the jobs overseas and still expecting unemployed Americans somehow to buy all the slave labor shit. Then the cities end up stuck with properties on which no taxes are paid. Literally nobody lays claim to those properties. So maybe it’s not that you don’t think it’s the case. It’s a case of maybe you just don’t think.
If you pay taxes, the cops will leave you alone, just. If you are rich, of course you pay no taxes, and the cops will protect you and your shit. If you are poor and don’t pay taxes you are an enemy of the state and the cops will destroy you at the first hint of the slightest infraction. Cops were invented by the rich. Don’t ever forget that.
“You have no right to be poor!” --nameless bureaucrat in Drop City
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I mean, if you’re homeless, then just buy a house!
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His idea: build three shelters to accommodate 3,000 people total, and bring in National Guard security specialists, social work graduate students, and medical personnel to help manage them.
you have a lot of caveats in your sentence, and the mayor and his aide weren’t saying people couldn’t leave – just that they couldn’t be elsewhere. 
all of this reminds of the ds9 episodes that took place in 2024, where everyone who couldn’t afford a place to live were placed in “sanctuary districts” so nobody had to look at them anymore.
all complete with plenty of job placement and housing programs, just no jobs or housing for anyone to have.
thank god we have things like airb&b and private equity rental investments to eat up all the excess housing and force rental prices up.
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Just pluck them from the trees, like apples!
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I remember my mother and I getting into a vicious fight about this. She said that our small town in the ozarks didn’t have a homeless problem because they all were moved away by police and charities. I kept telling her that that was not an option available to everyone, because if everyone did that, you’d basically be saying “you don’t have a right to exist.” She eventually figured it out and came to the conclusion that I did, which sounds dramatic but isn’t really. If you ship/bus people out from your place, and are okay with everyone else doing the same, what you’re effectively saying is that you might as well just execute people for being homeless because they don’t deserve to live ANYWHERE.
And after she realized that, she got real quiet, and last I heard is an advocate for local housing projects and job / training / keeping homeless people housed projects in her town.
You win some battles, I guess.
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SRO’s were legislated out of existence by changed zoning standards to allow developers to convert them.
Oddly - the decrease in SRO’s and the increasing number of people unhoused dovetails. It may not have been the most ideal option, but it’s better than what replaced it.
https://shnny.org/supportive-housing/what-is-supportive-housing/history-of-supportive-housing
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The dehumanizing language is what bothers me the most. It sounds like someone talking about feeding stray cats. “Well you know if you keep feeding them, they’re just going to keep showing up, and they’ll bring more with them. If you just stopped feeding them, they’d quit coming around!” And I know this story is about housing, not food, but they’re using the same language, and it pisses me off.
And I have that argument about people choosing to be homeless with supposedly liberal Democrat friends of mine all the time. Ugh. Although to be fair, I once said things like that myself. And then I got poor for awhile. I was never homeless, but it was an uncomfortably close possibility for awhile, and it really opened my eyes.
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In my city we have a sizable shelter as well as numerous “tiny homes” onsite, each with a private bath, air conditioning and a kitchen area. We also have programs available to help with addiction, mental health, financial management, job skills training, etc. The problem is getting people to use the programs to help themselves. Many of the homeless around here choose instead to camp in the woods adjacent to public parks and have no desire to seek treatment for addiction. Others in need of mental health services may not have the cognitive ability to realize that treatment is necessary. Last year I was part of a volunteer group to clean up a former homeless camp site and the area was full of needles. I’m not sure what the solution is but I know that simply shuffling them off to another location will not solve anything.
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Just don’t try moving them to the streets in NYC: then Mayor Adams will simply have to move them somewhere else – maybe back to Malibu.
It is so obvious that more housing needs to be built, but the people who already own homes don’t want for more housing to be built because that would dilute the value of their homes. It’s an insane cycle of greed and inhumanity.
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