What Happens to Downtown?

[dann]

Not the only purpose.

The old Swedish Covid thread was stagnating a bit, so this was a good opportunity to kick-start the Covid arguments again.

Yes, the only purpose.

The nonsense about "the Covid year" in the OP served no other purpose than to make it seem irrational to continue to work from home or take other precautions to avoid the virus. Brainster explicitly argued against seeing vacant office space as "a great opportunity to provide affordable housing by converting office space to residential," i.e. against doing anything for the homeless.

That Trump one month later proposes the Endlösung to homelessness by rounding up the homeless and putting them in camps is no coincidence:
Trump Wants to Make Homelessness Illegal (Newsweek, April 18, 2023)
Trump Advocates Mass Incarceration, 'Tent Cities, to Address Homelessness (Reason Magazine, April 20, 2023)

And it's nothing new:
Trump’s looming cruel war on homeless people is America’s next big human-rights crisis | Will Bunch (Philadelphia Enquirer, Jan 2, 2020)
Donald Trump Is Poised to Forcibly Relocate Homeless Human Beings - Move Them into Concentration Camps to Please His Bloodthirsty Constituents (Michael Kohlhaas, Dec 9, 2019)

I think BrettM is probably with Trump and Brainster on this one.

 

[Brainster]

Yes, the only purpose.

The nonsense about "the Covid year" in the OP served no other purpose than to make it seem irrational to continue to work from home or take other precautions to avoid the virus. Brainster explicitly argued against seeing vacant office space as "a great opportunity to provide affordable housing by converting office space to residential," i.e. against doing anything for the homeless.

That Trump one month later proposes the Endlösung to homelessness by rounding up the homeless and putting them in camps is no coincidence:
Trump Wants to Make Homelessness Illegal (Newsweek, April 18, 2023)
Trump Advocates Mass Incarceration, 'Tent Cities, to Address Homelessness (Reason Magazine, April 20, 2023)

And it's nothing new:
Trump’s looming cruel war on homeless people is America’s next big human-rights crisis | Will Bunch (Philadelphia Enquirer, Jan 2, 2020)
Donald Trump Is Poised to Forcibly Relocate Homeless Human Beings - Move Them into Concentration Camps to Please His Bloodthirsty Constituents (Michael Kohlhaas, Dec 9, 2019)

I think BrettM is probably with Trump and Brainster on this one.

How are the homeless not living in tent cities these days?

 

[Beerina]

The thing about affordable housing is that it's competitive. And the owners of expensive apartment blocks don't like competition. Housing is not supposed to be available to people who don't serve the purpose of making landlords rich. And the tenants don't make those landlords rich if cheaper alternatives are available. It's called capitalism. And it isn't fond of affordable housing.


So room for more parks?! Many cities and the people living in them could do with some more of those.

Who do you lay the blame on for affordable housing? Arch capitalists would be happy to build more housing. Get out of the way?

Existing owners who are all NIMBY to crowding or lower-cost housing (but virtue signal they want some pol to do something about it...elsewhere.)?

Politicians happy to wield powers like zoning to control it all, and never receive a kickback?

Politicians happy to do rent control, eviscerating profit motive, that would yield lots of cheaper and cheaper housing, the same way store shelves are crammed with cheap stuff?

 

[wareyin]

Who do you lay the blame on for affordable housing? Arch capitalists would be happy to build more housing. Get out of the way?

At least around here, there are no arch capitalists chomping at the bit to build affordable housing when they can make more money building "starting in the $400,000s" style housing.

Are arch capitalists in your area less interested in making money than the ones we have here?

 

[dann]

Why would I lay the blame on anybody for affordable housing? I'm not the one who doesn't want it. And I'm not the one who wants to round up the homeless and put them in camps.

 

[Hercules56]

With regards to affordable housing, Ive always found it charming how one of America's most Progressive cities, San Francisco, refuses to end their elitist zoning laws which make it basically impossible for poor or middle class people to live there. Truly NIMBY Progressives.

 

[Checkmite]

How are the homeless not living in tent cities these days?

It's not for lack of trying; it's because the tent cities are routinely swept through and destroyed by police.

 

[theprestige]

It's not for lack of trying; it's because the tent cities are routinely swept through and destroyed by police.

The overarching policy is to decriminalize street camping, at municipal, county, and state levels. Some activists in Portland have had some success, pushing to clear camps that violate ADA mandates for accessible sidewalks. Most camps are allowed to persist for months at a time, before a desultory cleanup effort is made. And then the camp just reforms on the same spot a couple weeks later.

These camps are not "routinely swept through and destroyed". Rather, they routinely destroy the commons, and are very occasionally shifted from one neighborhood to another and back again. There is also routine and aggressive push-back against the police being involved in these sweeps. Which is probably one reason of many why the sweeps aren't all that routine.

 

[dann]

Housing in a Market Economy - Downtown and Elsewhere

With homelessness increasing nationwide, John Oliver takes a look at the way we discuss the unhoused, what policy failures are making the problem worse, and how we can help.
Intro
My liberalism gets lowered
The demonization of the homeless
A failure of perception
The modern version of homelessness
Mental health and addiction
Pricillas story
Public policy choices
Hostile architecture
Criminalizing homelessness
Unhoused people of color
Shelters
The problem with shelters
Housing first
Funding
NIMBY problem
"Seventy percent of low-income families are spending more than half their incomes on rent" And: "Only 37 affordable and available homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renter household."
Homelessness: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO on YouTube, Nov 1, 2021 - 24:55 min.)

John Oliver discusses why rent has become increasingly unaffordable, what we can do to combat a system that is stacked against tenants, and, of course, Dakota Johnson’s complex relationship to limes.

- Rent rising higher than income.
- After the 2008 housing crash, companies like these [Progress Residential, Invitation Homes, American Homes] popped up to snap up single-family homes and rent them out. And because institutional investors are always trying to maximize returns, they'll take any opportunity to push rents higher. Take Monarch, which has been called America's fastest growing landlord. Here is their owner last year, salivating at the prospect of rent hikes:

Bob Nichols: "We have an unprecedented opportunity, at least in my working lifetime, to really press rents, press rents on renewal, because the country is highly occupied. We're 97.5 percent. And so where are people gonna go? They can't go anywhere. They wanna be in an apartment, and so they have to be in apartments. And we have an unprecedented opportunity to press both on renewing leases for existing residents and to reset market rates, which we've reset numerous times even this year."

- Wow! 'They can't go anywhere' and for us that's 'an unprecedented opportunity to press them'. That is a terrible way to talk about people. ... So if you are wondering why your rent is going up, it may well be because your landlord sees the current affordable housing crisis as a chance to reset market rates.
Rent: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO on YouTube June 20, 2022, - 22:08 min.)

"Your landlord sees the current affordable housing crisis as a chance to reset market rates."
What was it Beerina said about this principle? "the same way store shelves are crammed with cheap stuff."
Yeah, right! That's how capitalism works, isn't it?!
(For the sake of pro-capitalism snowflakes, I used the euphemism market economy in the title of this posts.)

And as for the cheap inedible **** that store shelves are crammed with (because that's what those nice capitalists do for you, isn't it?), there are a couple of other episodes of Last Week Tonight that I can recommend:




Enjoy!

 

[dann]

A new study shows the rent-to-income ratio nearly doubled in a 35-year period ending in 2020, meaning Americans must spend significantly more of their earnings on rent than 40 years ago. The upshot: National median rent prices rose 149% during the studied period, while overall income grew just 35%.
US rent prices rising four times faster than income - Median rent price rose 149% from 1985-2020 while income grew just 35% MPA Mag, May 27, 2022)

Moody’s Analytics finds that renters in the U.S. now pay 30 percent of the median income for the average rent.
The typical American renter is now rent-burdened — meaning that 30 percent of the median U.S. income is required to pay the average rent, according to a new report from Moody’s Analytics.
“This 30 percent is a symbolic threshold, a milestone,” said Thomas LaSalvia, the director of economic research at Moody’s.
Reaching this threshold puts typical American renters — who earn the median income and pay the average rent — where they have never been before, Mr. LaSalvia said. (According to the Pew Research Center, about 36 percent of American households rented, rather than owned, their homes in 2019, the last year that reliable data was available from the Census Bureau.) Moody’s first started tracking the metric in 1999, when the typical rent-to-income ratio was 22.5 percent.
(...)
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development has defined rent-burdened families as those who spend more than 30 percent of their household income on housing and “may have difficulty affording necessities such as food, clothing, transportation, and medical care.”
The Typical American Renter Is Now Rent-Burdened, a Report Says (NYT, Jan 25, 2023)

Soaring Rent Put More Families At Risk, More Funding and Program Fixes For Market-Based Housing Choice Vouchers Could Help (yahoo!finance, April 18, 2023)

The solution is obvious to some people: Make it illegal to be homeless and put the homeless in concentration camps where they can be taught that losing one's home is a bad decision.
The attitude reminds me of Oscar Wilde's Aunt Augusta:

“To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”
"Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life."
Her response parodies smug self-centeredness in her disdain for other people’s petty problems.

 

[The Atheist]

Is there anything funnier than someone who is one of the privileged few, railing against the capitalism that allows them to be one of that privileged few?

 

[BrettM]

I think it is the Cuba Communist Covid Capitalist Combo at play here.

 

[dann]

Isn't it amazing how offended libertarians always get when you puncture the bubble of their fairy tale about how everything is always made cheaper and affordable for everybody in their capitalist paradise?
It is no wonder that they need to make the homeless invisible and to turn homelessness into a mental problem to be solved in concentration camps.

 

[Random person]

Communist rhetoric means lies.
Communist action means very serious criminality.

 

[Delvo]

So what?

 

[dann]

Random person is my personal stalker.

 

[Checkmite]

Most camps are allowed to persist for months at a time, before a desultory cleanup effort is made. And then the camp just reforms on the same spot a couple weeks later.

That sounds pretty routine to me; and I'd point out that Portland is a single city and its specific homeless issues aren't particularly stand-out.

 

[The Atheist]

I think it is the Cuba Communist Covid Capitalist Combo at play here.

That is so nailed it could have been Jesus' foot.

 

[Checkmite]

Yes, the only purpose.

The nonsense about "the Covid year" in the OP served no other purpose than to make it seem irrational to continue to work from home or take other precautions to avoid the virus.

Agreed, and that is the context behind a lot of this. Downtowns have been in decline for decades for the same reasons; the only reason certain parties are calling it a "problem" now is because it is now a convenient angle from which to attack the Covid response.

It's a bit like the blind hope of overturning the 2020 presidential election. They think if they can discredit the reasonableness of the response (vaccinations, masks, and mandates, etc) that means that any data collected or lessons learned as a result of those things must be discarded and ignored and things must be put back the way they were.

But that's silly; there's no un-ringing the bell. Covid's only real objective part in any of this was coincidentally providing a trial-by-fire to prove that technology has advanced to the point where a number of companies don't strictly need everyone to meet altogether in a single shiny glass building every day in order to do the kind of work they do. From a purely business/bottom line standpoint, if WFH gets the work done while saving the company money on infrastructure and services then the business should keep doing it, and most of them will unless they have a politically-motivated/Covid-denier leadership, or such a city or state government that will try to force them to revert.

 

[dann]

Kaiser officials issued a written statement stating that doctors and staff must wear masks while providing direct care to patients in the Santa Rosa hospital and emergency department. There are approximately 3,500 health care workers at the facility.
Visitors are also required to wear face coverings inside the hospital.
This policy change comes weeks after the California Department of Public Health lifted the last of the statewide mask mandates on April 3, which included rules for health care settings.
COVID outbreak hits Bay Area hospital, prompting new mask rule (SFChroncle)

In case anybody's wondering, no, this isn't something that happened in "the Covid year".