$
Even if that carpenter fellow were real he’d need to be a counterfeiter & not a fishmonger if he was going to help out.
…but I assert that there is a flaw inherent to your line of inquiry. The question isn’t how to improve homelessness, but how to repair the socioeconomic system that mandates it.
To bad it’s not just the USA. Sports brings out the worst in people everywhere
I actually do this for a living (try to end homelessness that is). The solution, of course, is blindingly simple, and even free market capitalism based. Build more housing. Thats it, that’s all it would take. If there were more housing, then market forces would kick in, and housing would become more affordable.
Problem is, of course, housing being more affordable is that the house you just bought for say a cool mill or two, mortgaged up the yinyang,counting on its appreciation as your retirement fund, suddenly isn’t worth that any more. For this to work, the value of your house, and everybody else’s, would have to depreciate. A lot. And more to the point, so would the value of all the (also mortgaged up the yingyang) commercial rental properties.
Aside from the rate payers, who would get screwed, and will vote accordingly, you would actually cause pain to banks and the rest of the financial and investment sector. Good luck with that, I mean you can sometimes screw the voters, but the banks? I don’t think so. So the zoning will remain insane, and pretty specifically forbid the building of low income housing in anybody’s backyard.
There is a very direct line: the actual price of all that lovely appreciating real estate making the rich richer and maybe even making a lucky few of the desperate middle class a bit better off if they manage to carry their insane mortgage for another 15 years, is the suffering of all the guys pushing shopping carts and sleeping in boxes. Its kinda like the homeless are the manure that nurtures all those beautiful homes.
But San Francisco is SO BEAUTIFUL they say, can’t muck it up with cheap concrete high-rises! You want it to look like Hong Kong or something? Well, yeah, actually, I do, if the price of all the picaresque beauty is a bag lady sleeping in an alley. ,
May I suggest a fine piece of short fiction by Ursela K Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas for a somewhat metaphoric but extremely accurate and apropos description of the situation.
Oh Jesus. My sympathies. I’m not particularly nearby, but I figure with traffic issues this is going to create throughout the area, I’ll save myself some headache by not leaving the house that weekend. Your traffic nightmare will last even longer than that, and leaving the house probably won’t even be an option.
It’s worse than that, as they’re not even in San Jose. The team in the city of Santa Clara, which means the city’s not even getting the “benefits” of promotion by having them there, given that only people who live in the area seem to know that’s where they actually are…
Yeah, I have Oregon plates as well. I’m not going anywhere.
In San Francisco? Seriously?
https://www.google.com/search?q=housing+shortage+san+francisco
I’m not saying your wrong about the solution but no one is building much in the way of more housing in SF.
I do like how you then blame everything on existing home owners though. That’s a nice touch!
Some cities have experimented with hiring homeless people during large events. The wages are slightly above walmart levels iirc, and offers some tangible benefit to those who participate. It’s more of a bandage than a real solution but it’s an example of an approach to be less hostile to vulnerable people who are frequently just put in mass detention during events of this magnitude.
Given that the South Bay has been building housing like mad for at least 40 years, turning it into a suburban wasteland of sprawl (and bedroom community for the rest of the bay area, i.e. no tax base) but with exploding house and rental costs and a huge homeless population, that’s clearly not sufficient. Because the free market doesn’t build affordable housing, it builds housing for people with $100K+ incomes (even those new concrete high-rises) thanks to the tech boom and income inequality. And the cities do make sure affordable housing is built, but a) it’s not remotely enough, and b) the incomes required to live there are still beyond much of the homeless population.
Three golf courses and two bowling lanes, to be used at the NFL’s convenience, and all fees to play the course will be waived…JFC, this makes me dislike the NFL even more than I already did.
College football used to be one of my things, but I recall the moment of watching a kickoff and reflexively steeling myself for the oh-so-common post-kickoff injury spectacle that I made the decision right there to stop watching/supporting the game. All the other shit behavior surrounding NCAA/NFL football serves as a constant reminder as to why I don’t bother anymore.
To quote from Wikipedia,
“Since the 1960s, San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area have enacted strict zoning regulations. Among other restrictions, San Francisco does not allow buildings over 40 feet tall in most of the city, and has passed laws making it easier for neighbors to block developments. Partly as a result of these codes, from 2007 to 2014, the Bay Area issued building permits for only half the number of needed houses, based on the area’s population growth.”
But it ain’t gonna happen of course
Hotels on the peninsula have already posted their room rates for that week. They’ll be making something, at least
I didn’t realize how bad this was until Prof. Oliver educated me.
Oh, fucking wikipedia - no, the entire Bay Area does not share SF’s strict zoning regulations. That quote is entirely about San Francisco - the Bay Area is not San Francisco. (San Francisco is actually quite small, in terms of square miles, and represents only a tiny fraction of the Bay Area.) I was born in the South Bay and live here now. I’ve seen all the green spaces disappear and be replaced by housing, and I’ve seen the population here more than double. So don’t fucking tell me the South Bay hasn’t been building housing because you clearly don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. They’ve been building housing like mad, but I’ve still seen property values increase 25-fold, even in my parents shitty neighborhood. Sure, the housing still may not be enough, but that’s because so many people want to live here (including a lot of engineers making twice as much money as everyone else), not because they’re not willing to build housing anywhere in the Bay Area.
Oh man, I hear you… this mirrors my approach to:
SXSW (South By Southwest) in Austin, which, if one includes the “Edu” and the “Eco” components, and the film festival, in addition to its original music showcase mission, obliterates more than a week of already impaired travel in Austin’s clogged infrastructure.
Austin City Limits in Austin (both weekends!), as above.
The University of Texas football team at-home games when they play this or that media-fomented arch rival from whatever other university.
Yeah, the worst of the onslaught is localized and mostly centralized, but I work really close to downtown. There’s been a significant increase in CCTV cameras in many parts of Austin, but the tourist spots and related hipster intersections seem the most heavily surveilled. Austin’s getting loved to death, high rises built by Saudi investors and VCs from Dallas. I empathize with San Franciscans who woke up one day and didn’t recognize the town they had grown to know and love. Here’s hoping Austin doesn’t get the crooked accounting and screwed-over homeless community aspects.
From the San Francisco unsheltered population, the StreetSheet newspaper.
From Austin, the Challenger street newspaper.
(edit: corrected typo)
You’re going to end an article as a professional journalist with “Fuck the Super Bowl”?? Really? You are ignoring so many issues here. The jobs that the Super Bowl creates, the positive light that your city is put in, all the business that will be brought to the city from all the visitors, the fact that your homeless problem is finally being debated and dealt with (I swear that’s the number one reason I hate visiting SF) and it’s the Super Bowl for crying out loud! It’s an American institution! Be proud! Be thankful! Celebrate and have fun! Its a game!! Come on!!!
While Corey is a professional writer, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him claim to be a journalist. This is a blog, that he and several others post pieces on. Many are based on opinions, and some are just the authors spitballing an idea.
As far as “Fuck the Superbowl” goes, that’s a direct quote from the title of a post on a different site he linked to. Seems legit.
The homeless “problem” in SF has been discussed and debated since I can remember (1970’s) with varying results.
The jobs the Super Bowl creates are all transient.
The visitors may get up to SF as it is a more “interesting” city than Santa Clara, though If I were in town for the game I can think of multiple destinations for dining, movies, or whatever else that are far more proximal to the stadium location than SF actually is. It will be interesting to see how many gains SF actually reaps from the game.
Oh, and welcome to bOiNG bOiNG.
I’ve lived in a Super Bowl city. The Bowl no doubt benefited a select few, but didn’t do anything tangible for the vast majority of the population. Except inconvenience those who had to drive somewhere that weekend.
In ancient times it was bread and circuses.
Why do we sell our complacency so cheaply?
The Olympics, but with added brain damage and no unsightly foreigners.
But America always wins. Isn’t that the point?
