How many homeless people live in San Francisco as a percentage of the base population? Any guesses?
20%?
10%?
5%, 3%, 2%...?
How about 0.8%?
As a percentage of California's 1930 population, how many people left Oklahoma (one state) and migrated to California during the dust-bowl?
8% is the correct answer.
What percentage of mortgages were "underwater" during the depths of the Great Recession?
9.1%. Bear in mind that some people think that the "Great Recession" was a warm-up act for the next one since inefficient businesses and cities were not allowed to fail, debt increased and there is still an enormous overhang of derivatives.
As a rhetorical question: How would your community handle 8% homelessness? Would your community tolerate humans squatting in the streets (pun intended).
Around here, most houses are large enough that families could double-up. In San Francisco, one-bedroom apartments rent for an average of $3600 a month and two-bedroom apartments rent for $4600 a month. Not much of a buffer, there.
Additionally, there are countless travel-trailers parked beside garages and behind barns throughout the Rust Belt. All it would take to turn them into temporary apartments would be LP in the tanks and an extension cord.
Yes, I know some homeless are mentally ill and "want" to live on the streets. For a while we shared a "homeless" girl with the town of Charlotte. Frankly, she had a home but her parents said she could not live there as long as she did illegal drugs (opioids, in her case) and hooked for a living. I haven't seen her for a while and heard a rumor that she had O.D.ed in the restroom of a fast food restaurant.
Seriously, in your estimation, would your community be able to handle 8% of the residents being turned out of their homes more gracefully than San Francisco is handling their 0.8%?
I honestly don't think most places would put up with that level of homelessness... Committed, then given a ticket to Austin. There isn't the money NOR the mentality to put up with homeless because they want to be around here. (Farming/ranching community)...
ReplyDeleteDon't get me started on the so-called 'homeless'. Oops, too late!
ReplyDeleteHere in Phoenix, it seems like you see them now at almost every major intersection. Back when I was a youngster, they were called what they are - bums. The 'homeless' fall into two categories. The largest one is those who COULD work and thus not be homeless, but choose not to. If there were no social safety net, and if they could not make money by panhandling, they would disappear from the street corners almost overnight.
The other category is those who are not capable of working because they cannot function in society. In other words, they are mentally ill. They need to be in an institution for evaluation and treatment. Again, when I was was young, we had a kinder and wiser society that took care of these people in an institutional setting, instead of turning them out in the mean streets to fend for themselves.
In any case, bums defeating in public on the streets would NEVER have been tolerated back in my day. I am dumbfounded that today it is tolerated anywhere for even a New York minute.
Defecating, not defeating. I hate this so-called smart phone. It sometimes changes entire sentences into something totally different than what I actually typed. Note to self: Figure out how to turn off the spell check feature. Today!
DeleteChanging culture doesn't collapse a society. A collapsing society changes culture. Resource contraction is causing these breakdowns. Desperate to survive as an entity, your cell phone maker hires Hindu's to program your spell check that doesn't know English. Less resources to warehouse the insane. The economic pie shrinks, everyone fights for the pieces, bankers win and we lose. Wheat. Ammo. Popcorn.
ReplyDelete