Shocking images show the TWO-MILE long vehicle encampment - made up of people living in RVs, trucks and trailers - along Highway 101 north of San Francisco as low income people are pushed out of the housing market
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: FarmGirl on May 06, 2023, 11:24 AM
Binford Road where these folks are isn't along the coast. The tsunami would hit a range of hills to the west before getting to San Pablo Bay, then it would have to about reverse direction and go back up the Petaluma River, and then make a left turn and end up in the lake they are parked beside. Seems relatively safe from tsunamis. Those California homeless sure seem smarts!
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on May 06, 2023, 11:55 AM
CA Geography is not my strong point. I thought HY101 was on a coastal Lagoon. I was thinking of HY1.
RE
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: FarmGirl on May 06, 2023, 04:14 PM
I love HWY101, it's the one that goes through the redwoods. Spends more time inland than HWY 1, for sure. HWY 1 going from LA to San Fran runs the coast and is gorgeous. I've got to get to the part of it above San Fran sometime.
Title: Seattle is Dying
Post by: RE on Jul 20, 2023, 02:13 AM
I only watched 15 min of this vid before my puke reflex became overwhelming. The POV here is basically what's left of the middle class moaning about how their quality of life has become so horrible because of all those awful messy homeless people and the mountains of garbage lining the Seattle streets. Off the record, the Survey Sez the answer is simple, cops need to enforce the law and lock these criminals up! It sucks because Homeless people think they can get free medical care and free food and free tents so they all come here! lol. In the 1st 15 minutes of this hour long demonization of the homeless, not a single homeless person actually got interviewed. They just shot videos of the memtally ill and drug addicted archetypal bums lining the streets, screaming and decompensating or passed out in a drunken stupor in a pile of garbage. Not even a passing thought about how so many people got this way to begin with, or how lousy THEIR lives are. It just sucks because it's ruining MY life because I have to look at it and I don't feel safe!
Even if locking them all up WAS a solution, how is that gonna get paid for? They sure aren't gonna vote to have their Property Taxes raised to build more jails and hire more prison guards.
Now, I don't feel safe when I'm rolling around downtown Anchorage either on my Ewheelz and sitting at a bus stop with half a dozen hard cases arguing with each other or with people who aren't actually there, but I am not so stupid as to think you could fix this just by having a bus rolling around with cops loading them in and driving over to the station to charge them with violating the vagrancy laws, drinking in public, smelling really bad and yelling too loud.
Basically, the downtown area of most major big shities now resembles the set of the Walking Dead or other post Apocalyptic TV show, and while sitiing at a downtown bus stop it's pretty hard to argue that the Collapse isn't already here. Same thing out in many suburbs around the closed Malls, parks and Public Schools.
What's the answer? Stay home if you still have one, have your groceries delivered by InstaCart and stream another rerun of a Superhero movie. The city streets won't be improving anytime soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw
RE
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 20, 2023, 02:35 AM
QuoteI only watched 15 min of this vid before my puke reflex became overwhelming.
You are not the first. That happened to me a couple of years ago. No surprise that I have seen this production by the Seattle Petite Bourgeoisie.
I remember I had to turn it off and walk around a while before I finished it. I wanted to punch a judgemental mofo in the face.
I remember what was pissing me off. The deep bible-thumper message is all these people caused their own problems. Everything they experience they brought upon themselves, and the only solution of course is to change thy ways. Can someone say Sinner Repent!
In terms of manifesting behaviors I agree. Hard cases do need a lifestyle change.
But How does one get from A to B and how did a person get to be is state A (The state of being fucked.) to begin with. What incentives provide results?
Any generalized answer is impossible, and someone looking for one is a moron.
Very good questions, and I can postulate a few answers with a little Sherlock Holmes type observation & deduction.
First thing is observing the demographic. These folks are mostly between the ages of 20-50, with the real hard cases being right in the middle in their late 20s-early 30s. Younger kids heading in that direction get picked up by CPS and given a little more in the way of help with group homes and counseling, and they haven't spent that much time on the street doing drugs they're totally fucked up yet. Folk older than 50 who have been consuming mass quantities of drugs and alcohol for a couple of decades tend to die as their livers resemble swiss cheese and give out.
The beginners in their 20s tend to come out of the foster homes system after bouncing around there for the first 20 years of their lives, having been removed from their original less than ideal living situation with a parent or parents at the low end of the socio economic spectrum. Said parents may have held some kind of crappy job, but probably had substance abuse issues of their own, and the kids learned everything they needed to know about drugs by the time they got to Junior High.
If they managed to graduate HS, they still couldn't read anything longer than a twitter message, although they might be able to add and subtract to do drug transactions and bargain at the pawn shop for how much the tv they stole is worth. They are basically unemployable, quickly land on the streets and busy themselves finding ways to get enough money to score some drugs. If they're female and still decent looking enough with a few teeth left, they work as prostitutes. If they're male,they go into the robbery and burglary bizness, along with dealing some drugs.
By the time they hit 30 if they make it that far they've been in countless fights with others like them on the streets, or with the cops. Violence has become a way of life, and if they are hopped up on some crystal meth, you have a human A-Bomb walking the streets ready to explode at any moment.
If you could even get these folks to counseling, do you really think you could fix psychological problems 30 years in the making with a couple of hours of therapy a week with an overworked social worker? Not gonna happen.
To fix this problem, you need to go back all the way to where it starts, back with the parents who bred them and the basically hopeless lives they lived at the bottom end of the society 30-50 years ago. Contrary to what you might think, everybody growing up then didn't live like Kevin & Winnie Cooper of the Wonder Years or the cast of Beverly Hills 90210. A much larger percentage of the population was living in the decaying cities of the rust belt and the dying towns out in West Texas, Kansas and Nebraska. Its the children of those folks who have migrated out to the cities of San Francisco and Seattle where the weather generally isn't too bad, they can find food, score some drugs and steal some cars or burglarize some McMansions.
Are we as a society doing anything to fix the etiology of this problem, which begins with the kids growing up in households with no hope, homes being foreclosed on and schools which fail to educate? Of course we're not, those problems are only getting worse, so one can predict with fair certainty the problem of whacked out homeless people will only increase for the forseeable future.
RE
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 20, 2023, 12:44 PM
That is a good description of many no doubt.
Working a McJob was one thing when I was in my 20's. Working one now is an eye-opener.
No way can a person work a McJob without having their life subsidized in some way. All income would go to food or rent. Wages will not cover both. The 'get a job' theme promoted in 'Seattle is Dying' has no appeal because it won't work. The American food chain is not set up that way.
Hard cases come in the store to rip us off all the time. My fellow employees want to go medieval on their asses. I fully understand their point of view. Too much 'shrinkage' and the store could close to open somewhere else. The self-justification that one is stealing from a corporation and not employees is not as simple as a twisted conscience would have it. People 'doing the right thing' for minimum reward are also not fond of freeloaders. It is a redneck sort of thing, and the sun has been on my neck.
But the hard cases who match your demographic have no conscience needing a twist into self-justification. They walk into the store to steal and for no other reason. Old beat up cars with a get-away driver. They come in, load up shopping carts, bags and backpacks, then they leave.
What we can officially do is limited. We may not sting. But we swarm.
But that is another story. Humans are creative. The right incentives and tactics of persuasion would reach a majority of the lost if our society provided such things.
Which we don't.
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 20, 2023, 01:51 PM
Shocking images show the TWO-MILE long vehicle encampment - made up of people living in RVs, trucks and trailers - along Highway 101 north of San Francisco as low income people are pushed out of the housing market
"Low Income" is anybody making <$150K is social pressure creating these new American Gypsies. Locked out of the American Dream it looks like Custer's Last Stand will be repeated in history sometime soon. Or some such version featuring Winnebago Teepees. Ironic that.
Rantz: Homeless at encampment with pool explain why they won't leave (https://mynorthwest.com/3909645/rantz-homeless-at-encampment-with-pool-explain-why-they-wont-leave/)
Rantz, by the way I have had peripheral contact with. He can be a POS.
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jul 20, 2023, 02:29 PM
Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 20, 2023, 12:44 PMHard cases come in the store to rip us off all the time. My fellow employees want to go medieval on their asses. I fully understand their point of view. Too much 'shrinkage' and the store could close to open somewhere else. The self-justification that one is stealing from a corporation and not employees is not as simple as a twisted conscience would have it. People 'doing the right thing' for minimum reward are also not fond of freeloaders. It is a redneck sort of thing, and the sun has been on my neck.
But the hard cases who match your demographic have no conscience needing a twist into self-justification. They walk into the store to steal and for no other reason. Old beat up cars with a get-away driver. They come in, load up shopping carts, bags and backpacks, then they leave.
What we can officially do is limited. We may not sting. But we swarm.
Definitely what can be done to reduce the "shrinkage" is limited. In many jurisdictions now if a shoplifter manages to get out of the store, store security personnel are not allowed to pursue. By the time cops arrive on the scene, the perps are in the wind.
Of course this is another nail in the coffin for the brick & mortar shopping experience, pretty soon you'll need to buy everything online and your groceries delivered by Door Dash. At which point our perps will adapt and start hijacking more UPS trucks and delivery drivers. Hungry for a Pizza? Call Dominos and give them a random address and sit outside in your car till the driver arrives, then take the pizza from him before he can ring the doorbell.
Agreed incentives and persuasion could make some dent, but it would be expensive and perceived by many as being a reward for being a low life. Nobody's gonna want to give them decent free housing if they are spending their whole paycheck to keep a roof overhead. Besides the threat of prison, not sure what means you have for persuasion, accepting the idea thumbscrews are not an option.
RE
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jul 21, 2023, 09:13 AM
OK, here's an incentive UBI pilot program in Denver.
Denver's universal basic income project reports early success
Now, the $50/mo group is a joke. This pays your cell phone bill.
The other 2 programs are slightly more realistic, but neither is enough by itself just to rent a 1 bedroom apartment in the Denver market, much less cover all the rest of your basic costs for living like food, transportation and communication. So you're homeless hard case you're trying to help bootstrap himself up still needs a job, but even a $15/hr min wage job should be enough supplemented by the UBI.
One would expect that staying eligible for your monthly UBI check requires staying clean and not getting in trouble with the cops, but thats gonna take frequent visits by a social worker at the least. The real question is assuming your hard case can clean up enough to actually get a job like say stacking shelves in a warehouse, will he be able to keep it for more than a week? Show up on time for his shifts, not get in fights with other workers, do what the boss says without mouthing off, resist the temptation to steal some merchandise, not call in sick more than once or twice a month etc? The social skills said person has acquired to survive living on the street are not generally the same ones needed in the workplace.
Anyhow, the UBI is at least some attempt to save these lost souls, but the cost of expanding it beyond a pilot program would be high, because after all not only the hard cases need the UBI, so does every other worker in the warehouse. The rednecks who work there and are not ex-junkies would not be pleased if they didn't get the free money also.
RE
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 21, 2023, 11:15 AM
I removed the double post.
The article says the money comes from charitable donations. Taxes would have to generate money if UBI ever is more than an experiment.
It is a patch job. Extra money offsets costs the homeless, (I am going to put the term 'unhoused' up my ass sideways.) can't afford because of the ever growing economic divide.
QuoteOver the past 50 years, the highest-earning 20% of U.S. households have steadily brought in a larger share of the country's total income. In 2018, households in the top fifth of earners (with incomes of $130,001 or more that year) brought in 52% of all U.S. income, more than the lower four-fifths combined, according to Census Bureau data.
In 1968, by comparison, the top-earning 20% of households brought in 43% of the nation's income, while those in the lower four income quintiles accounted for 56%.
Taxes are essential, but the Republican party has cut taxes so only the military and police float in a sea of cash. There is nothing left for anything good.
QuoteOverall, 61% of Americans say there is too much economic inequality in the country today, but views differ by political party and household income level. Among Republicans and those who lean toward the GOP, 41% say there is too much inequality in the U.S., compared with 78% of Democrats and Democratic leaners, a Pew Research Center survey conducted in September 2019 found.
From which we can conclude American Republicans are bigger A-holes than Democrats are. But they may in fact only be more honest.
The top 20% has to stop buying apartment buildings and charging $2000 a month rent. But Dems will fight rent controls as hard as Republicans. Those in the top 20% think it is their god given right to charge as much rent as they want. They earned that money the bank paid interest on and it is a free country so they can do what they want. Some such bull they will say.
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jul 21, 2023, 12:29 PM
Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 21, 2023, 11:15 AMIt is a patch job. Extra money offsets costs the homeless, (I am going to put the term 'unhoused' up my ass sideways.) can't afford because of the ever growing economic divide.
Here in fact is where the real problem lies, because all that would happen if you did hand out an extra $1000/mo to everyone, landlords would simply jack up the rents to reflect the additional cash in the renter's wallets. As long as there is a shortage of affordable housing, property owners will charge as much as the market will bear. The end result id price inflation, and the recipients of this money end up no better off than before they got it. Landlord profits will of course increase though.
UBI programs can't work without price controls also, which is something the rentier class of capitalists will never accept. Once you do go down this road, you are in a managed economy, like the old Soviet Union. At least there though everybody did have an apartment, although they were all pretty shit and butt ugly project type housing. We all know also how well project housing worked out here in the FSoA Inner Cities in the aftermath of LBJs "Great Society" programs, which turned out not so great.
Goobermint may allocate money to build these places, but they never allocate the continuing money necessary to maintain them. They may look pretty good as architectural models and right before the 1st occupants move in, but after a year or two lights are out in hallways, elevators don't work and playgrounds and common areas are strewn with garbage and used needles. Middle class critics shake their heads and bloviate about how "those people" don't take pride in their homes and don't maintain them properly. You think those prideful Condo owners do their own maintenance? Hell no, they pay a monthly fee to the HOA to do regular maintenance and a waste management company to pick up the trash every day. A housing project is lucky if the sanitation dept shows up once a week to empty their dumpsters, which regularly begin to overflow. New lightbulbs have to be requisitioned, and when they arrive promptly get stolen by the hard cases blowing crack pipes on the basketball court. There's no doorman keeping track of who enters the buildings, andentrance doors locks are broken and not fixed.
Thus the whole affordable housing problem remains a major bear, and as long as these projects exist they are petri dishes for blooming drug addiction, gang activity and the regular domestic violence and drive by shootings we are all too familiar with from TV cop shows.
Do I have an answer for this problem? Not really, but what wwe are currently doing or not doing DEFINITELY is not working, so almost anything eelse is worth trying.
RE
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: Nearings Fault on Jul 25, 2023, 06:08 AM
I don't generally find people who invest in real estate evil but the last decade has created a lot of moral ambiguity. Here is an article https://globalnews.ca/news/8754119/canada-budget-2022-home-prices/ So, 30 percent of serving federal politicians have income property. That leads to some hazy decision making as far as I'm concerned if you have to regulate it. On a more local level I know of 3 examples of places that should be traditional basic rentals that are now glamped up air b and b setups. Hard to fault the owners as the people are there for only a few days and you make as much as with a whole month of regular rental, they pay up front, you don't have to worry about trying to evict serial non payers, the short term renters have set out rules about damages and responsibilities that would make a tenant landlord arbitrator apoplectic. Then there is seasonal cottages. They used to get rented out in the winter to a group of people who generally lived in a camp like setting 9 months a year then rented a better place all winter. Those setups dried up as more and more cottage owners decided the extra money was not worth the hassle. I don't think the local rules have caught up to the trends yet. If we cared about housing we would have insurers penalize the crap out of short term renters, cancel any kind of tax offset for second properties mortgage interest for starters.
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jul 25, 2023, 07:03 AM
I read an article recently which said the "home ownership" paradigm was fading into the sunset asa greater and greater percentage of single family dwellings are being purchased as investment properties by corporations like Blackrock and then rented out. Not surprising since few people can qualify for mortgages at the prices they sell at now. Said corporations can also afford to keep properties off the rental market to reduce supply and artificially maintain high prices. The capitalist system is definitely NOT set up to benefit the individual homeowner. Rather it favors corporations with access to large amounts of cheap debt unavailable to the individual. You can't get a mortgage at a rate a couple of points over the Fed discount rate like an investment capital firm has access to through the CMBS market.
Of course all this debt has been rehypothecated so many times there isn't really collateral to cover all that debt, so eventually it will collapse. Until it does though, the system is totally FUBAR.
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Title: Anchorage surpasses homeless outdoor deaths record, reports 6 deaths in less tha
Post by: RE on Jul 27, 2023, 10:11 PM
Setting new records for dead bums on the streets of Anchorage. This is in summer. If they don't figure out the shelter issue, it's gonna be a rough winter for the hard cases.
Anchorage surpasses homeless outdoor deaths record, reports 6 deaths in less than a week
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Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 28, 2023, 12:04 AM
Quote from: RE on Jul 27, 2023, 10:11 PMSetting new records for dead bums on the streets of Anchorage. This is in summer. If they don't figure out the shelter issue, it's gonna be a rough winter for the hard cases.
Anchorage surpasses homeless outdoor deaths record, reports 6 deaths in less than a week
RE
It is hard to explain how I do this calculation. People dying in hospital are not in the count. So 29 means to me that there are about 10,000 homeless in Anchorage.
I could be way off. In the thousands for sure.
Any local sources have a number?
Title: Anchorage homeless face cold and bears. A plan to offer one-way airfare out
Post by: RE on Aug 03, 2023, 06:40 AM
According to this article, the current count is "more than 3000" homeless homo saps (HHS) in Anchorage. How many more? Who knows? Taking an average between K-Dog's 10K and 3K, call it 6500. This with a total population of slightly under 300K, for an HHS rate of 2%. If a city the size of NYC (8M) had this HHS rate, there would be 160K HHS. Actual estimate is around 70K, so about double the per capita rate there.
Latest plan? Hand them free tickets to the Lower 48. One quote from a HHS said he'll go to Seattle because he heard the weather is better there. ::) I would suggest Miami for the Winter, then he probably could get a free bus ticket to Bangor next summer. Be a Snowbird HHS rat! Or maybe get his free plane ticket destination as Honolulu. Hawaii is pretty comfortable year around due to being surrounded by the pacific ocean.
One thing an AK HHS would be giving up if he accepted one of these one way tickets to paradise on the streets of Seattle would be his annual share of the PFD,, the check every resident gets from the Oil industry, which last year was $3200. This year it's looking to be half that, but still it covers your cancerettes if you keep your smoking habit down to 1/4 pack/day, or better yet roll your own.
There is a big Mall named Northway that's been closed for years I would think would be a logical choice, but so far they got no funding for anything. If they don't figure out something, its gonna start getting ugly in about 3 months. At least the bears are hibernating in the winter though. :)
Title: Growing number of people living in vehicles presents a new dilemma for Anchorage
Post by: RE on Oct 04, 2023, 08:19 AM
The long arm of the law once again used to prevent those too poor to afford a fixed domicile to help themselves and use the Bugout Machine solution for serviceable shelter during the cold Alaska winter. If there's no law on the books against it, TPTB will just make a new one! Prroblem solved.
Now, personally I don't know why the owners of these BMs all pick these Downtown locations, because there are many much more desirable places a little further out of downtown with better access to Walmart and other Food Superstores where you go to get you supply of propane, food and of course booze and smokes. Maybe because congregating in groups makes it harder for the Gestapo to tow away a lone vehicle when it is discovered in a concealed location away from prying eyes and not lowering the property values much f already pretty low rent districts. Of course, the slumlords who own properties where for a price you can legally park your BM, and don't want their clients to use the free option of the commons.
In the capitalist model, there are no commons, all land is Private Property or Goobermint owned, and rent and taxes must always be paid to have a place to live.
Growing number of people living in vehicles presents a new dilemma for Anchorage
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Title: 'We do not have enough space' in Massachusetts shelters, Gov. Healey says
Post by: RE on Oct 17, 2023, 01:39 AM
As if our own homegrown homeless problem isn't bad enough, our usual forward thinking goobermint is importing families from other countries, all through legal channels and not illegal migrants without having any kind of plan in place on how or where to house them.
Now, we all know that pressure is on to keep the immigrants flowing in, because of a serious shortage of cheap labor to staff Mickey Ds, hotel maids, restaurant dishwashers and landscapers for the Hamptons mansions of the .001%. At the same time however, there is a shortage of affordable housing if you even have a decent paying job, much less the often sub-minimum wage jobs available to wetbacks who can't even speak english yet. They don't even at least have the forethought to just import unmarried single who could triple and quadruple up to afford a 1 bedroom slum or efficiency studio in a section 8 motel, they are shipping them in complete with the kindergarten kids in tow. This to insure that there are still more workers to take low paid jobs in the pipeline a decade from now.
Where is this influx coming from? Besides the usual suspects down in Central & South America, you of course also have the war refugees from Ukraine, Iraq, Palestine etc rolling in by the boatloaad. We are not talking small numbers here, MA a relatively small state already boasts 7000 families, expected to be up to 7500 by the end of the month. This of course just as winter begins to bite in the Northeast. One can only guess how many are debarking in NYC tonight, since it is the traditional first stop for the tired, hungry & poor population of useless eaters necessry to keep the capitalist system running.
At some point here this shit is just gonna break, and they will not be able to gloss over it with a few million thrown at motel slumlords to put some roofs over these people's heads. The clock is ticking.
'We do not have enough space' in Massachusetts shelters, Gov. Healey says
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Title: As officials begin moving Anchorage’s unhoused to winter shelter, a long and gro
Post by: RE on Oct 19, 2023, 08:13 AM
Back from the East Coast to Homeless in the far west of the Last Great Frontier, with Winter beginning to set in but not quite yet baring its full white icy teeth, Anchorage is finally implementing its plan for the Homeless population. Although a smaller estimated number than Mass-of-we-could-give-2shits, their budget is concommitently smaller as well. They also of course predictably have underestimated the numbers even publicly, and I can about guarantee the actual number of unreported and uncounted is near double the published count. So, they already have a waiting list with no place to put them, and are scrambling to figure something out before the sub-zero nights come rolling in along with snowfall measured in feet and nor inches. 48 dead already this year, so we're on track to set a new annual by Dec 31st, but the winter toll between now and the Ides of March is the really interesting one to watch.
Fortunately, I remain comfortably housed in my $16,500/mo Dorm Room for Cripples at SNIF University, which so far Medicaid continues to reliably pay on time, although I have had some suspicious "impromptu" chats regarding a discharge plan from the supervising doctor and the asst Social Work director so I'm never feeling very safe, with the Sword of Damocles always hanging over my head that I'll be given an ultimatum about getting out of here for someplace cheaper to house my crippled ass.
Still not freezing to death as a homeless cripple on the streets of Anchorage, Alaska.
I've always advocated for Van ownership if you are sliding off the economic cliff, and prior to getting evicted from your last apartment if you do own a car, trade it in for a van before you pay your last couple of months of rent.
Vans can park in all the same spots as carz, but unlike RVs don't totally advertize that you live in it as long as it looks like a mom's soccer van or a flower shop delivery vehicle. Vans provide much more comfortable sleeping space and more room for storage of extra clothes, a hibachi grill, a computer work station etc than a car does. Also you can have a toilet bucket/seat combo and piss jug for privacy for your excretory needs during the nightime sleeping hours. After you poop into the bucket lined with a plastic shopping bag, you go dispose of the poop in the nearest dumpster. Trucker use this trick all the time. OTR tractors have nice sleeping berths but no mini bathroom like RVs usually.
I kept a van bugout machine right up until this last move into the SNIF. It just became too big a pain in the ass keeping the battery charged up since I never used it. Although in a pinch I probably could still drive using my left foot, getting in and out by myself was close to impossible. So now, if I lose my last fixed domicile living arrangement, I will die when the next winter sets in, a frozen cripple living on the streets of Anchorage Alaska. So far, it looks like I am good for this winter though.
https://vandwellers.org/
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Title: LA will destroy its tourism industry if it turns its hotels into homeless shelte
Post by: RE on Oct 27, 2023, 07:24 PM
How about booking them into AirBnBs? The Homeless Hilton! Beverly Hills 90210 Homeless?
Seriously, as a mixed use facility with tourists, the problems are obvious, but there is no reason an entire hotel couldn't be booked by the city. Corporations do this all the time for conventions. They get a reduced rate on all the rooms. The city would have to take out insurance for damages.
LA will destroy its tourism industry if it turns its hotels into homeless shelters
RE
Title: Goobermint Sanctioned Hoovervilles
Post by: RE on Nov 13, 2023, 12:02 PM
We have all been treated for quite some time to all of the impromptu Tent Cities that homeless and migrants have set up in various major cities as well as along the Rio Grande as they await their interviews for entrance into the Land of Good & Plenty. Until now however the only ones that were officially run by Da Goobermint were the ones directly surrounding the Border Crossings.
The combined problem of locally grown homelessness and rapid influx of migrants from war zones and failed states has now become so large that major cities like New York and Phoenix are opening up official Hoovervilles, the name for the Tent Cities that sprung up under the administration of Herbert Hoover, POTUS at the beginning of the Great Depression.
I have long been in favor of creating designated spaces for legalized camping in tents and cars & RVs as an alternative to the regular sweeps and cleanups of locations, where the residents pickup and move somewhere else for a while, then eventually move back, rinse and repeat 2 or 3 times over the winter months making problems for everyone since they don't have anywhere better for them to go to. You can make the encampment disappear for a while but the people do not disappear. Not yet anyhow.
So OK, now they are trying the legal tent cities method, with 2 problems. On the one hand, the Human Rights advocates types do not consider such living arrangements worthy of human habitation since they lack such amenities a hot & cold running water, flush toilets and central heating. The prospective residents don't like them because they are dropped down in the middle of nowhere without so much as a convenience store nearby, plus restrictions against alcohol. This means you can't even have a beer at home in your tent space! That really is inhumane treatment!
With their current configuration, I do not forsee these Hoovervilles to make much of a dent in the homeless situation. Right now in NYC where empty commercial real estate is in hefty supply, I think renting out some of these buildings and converting them for residential living would be a better alternative. That won't happen too soon either.
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: moniker on Nov 14, 2023, 06:04 PM
Quote from: RE on Nov 13, 2023, 12:02 PMWith their current configuration, I do not forsee these Hoovervilles to make much of a dent in the homeless situation. Right now in NYC where empty commercial real estate is in hefty supply, I think renting out some of these buildings and converting them for residential living would be a better alternative. That won't happen too soon either.
Finding an appropriate name for homeless encampments would appear a good reason to re-elect Trump to the presidency. Designating these Trumpvilles would be an amusing and ironic tribute to the master builder.
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Nov 14, 2023, 07:17 PM
Quote from: RE on Nov 13, 2023, 12:02 PMWith their current configuration, I do not forsee these Hoovervilles to make much of a dent in the homeless situation. Right now in NYC where empty commercial real estate is in hefty supply, I think renting out some of these buildings and converting them for residential living would be a better alternative. That won't happen too soon either.
Finding an appropriate name for homeless encampments would appear a good reason to re-elect Trump to the presidency. Designating these Trumpvilles would be an amusing and ironic tribute to the master builder.
While BO was POTUS we called them Obamavilles, but Bidenvilles just doesn't have a good ring to it. Trumpvilles is excellent, particularly due to the real estate irony. However, that is not a good enough reason to vote for him. lol.
RE
Title: Why there is a lack of Affordable Housing in Amerika
Post by: RE on Nov 15, 2023, 06:32 AM
While I sit languishing on Waiting Lists to move back to an independent living situation, I have been pondering the question of WHY this housing is in such short supply, because it is clearly desperaately needed. The problem trickles down to the vast number of immigrants currently being shovelled into Hoovervilles because no housing is available for them either.
Is it really true that there aren't enough housing units available for all these people? I don't think so. I think the problem is that since real estate is a For Profit bizness, empty units are not being made available because if the rents are lowered to what people can afford, the assessed value of the property would be lower than the mortgage, which would mean that the banks who hold those mortgages would be insolvent. So the apartments are not rented, just listed at the unaffordable price they need to be rented at to pay the mortgage. The bank and the builders do not have to realize the loss as long as they maintain the fiction that the apartment can be rented at the luxury price they projected when they approved the developer's loan to build it 10 or 20 years ago.
If you go on Zillow or Rent.com or Apartments.com, in any neighborhood anywhere there are hundreds of 1 bedroom apartments available at whatever the neighborhood considers "market rate". So for instance here in Anchorage on Zillow alone there are 207 1-3 bedroom apts listed for between $1-2000/month. The problem is that the current 1000 or so people on the Shelter waiting list can't afford $1000/mo, many of them have $0 official income, they subsist on food stamps and money earned in the drug trade or pawning stolen good or odd jobs that pay cash. Even for those who get a SS check or a check from ther native tribe, it's only a few $100s/month.
However, if there are 1000 people with basically $0 in income, there are 10,000 people with income of $1000/mo, which is not sufficient to get approved for an apt that lists at $1500/mo. Property mgmt companies will not approve you if the rent is more than about 40% of your monthly income. This class of people is actually huge, because the average SS recipient in Alaska is $1348 for disability and $1614 for retirement. Since most people in this class also only have SS as their income, you are talking at least half of all retired and disabled people cannot afford market rate rents. Given the population as a whole is ageing, that's a lot of current Alaska residents. The same is true for all the people living down n the lower 48.
Quite clearly, something's gotta give here. I believe this must be declared a National Emergency and Force Majeure implemented over the Real Estate market nationwide. All properties commercial and residential currently unoccupied should be inventoried and then distributed out with 1 year leases for free. This will take everyone off the streets immediately.
Once the immediate problem is solved, the long term problem should be addressed. Since private developers won't build affordable housing, a Goobermint home building company like the WPA should be assigned the resposibility for building single and double occupancy units in every major city equal to or greater than the number of immigrants that city is expected to accept each year.
All these new housing units will be paid for by a wealth tax of 99% on all Billionaires.
The private real estate market will be allowed to adjust down ward once there is free public housing available for everyone. Insolvent banks will not be bailed out and all their remaining assets taken and their stockholders bankrupted.
Problem solved. ;D
RE
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: moniker on Nov 15, 2023, 03:49 PM
Quote from: RE on Nov 14, 2023, 07:17 PMWhile BO was POTUS we called them Obamavilles, but Bidenvilles just doesn't have a good ring to it. Trumpvilles is excellent, particularly due to the real estate irony. However, that is not a good enough reason to vote for him. lol.
RE
Thanks for the compliment RE! Bidenville sounds like Bougainvillea, a nice looking plant likely not found in a homeless camp.
Can't we find a better candidate than this NY conman?
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: moniker on Nov 15, 2023, 04:13 PM
Quote from: RE on Nov 15, 2023, 06:32 AMThe bank and the builders do not have to realize the loss as long as they maintain the fiction that the apartment can be rented at the luxury price they projected when they approved the developer's loan to build it 10 or 20 years ago.
This is a good observation if true because it is similar to banks not having to recognize a loss on low-interest bonds they hold if the bank says they intend to hold them until maturity. Of course saying you intended to hold until maturity and actually intending to do so are two different thing.
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Nov 15, 2023, 06:26 PM
Quote from: RE on Nov 15, 2023, 06:32 AMThe bank and the builders do not have to realize the loss as long as they maintain the fiction that the apartment can be rented at the luxury price they projected when they approved the developer's loan to build it 10 or 20 years ago.
This is a good observation if true because it is similar to banks not having to recognize a loss on low-interest bonds they hold if the bank says they intend to hold them until maturity. Of course saying you intended to hold until maturity and actually intending to do so are two different thing.
Yes, it is exactly the same thing, and almost certainly true because if not, then where did all the units go that have been built over the last 20 years? How is it that there is such a sudden increase in disparity between the number of housing units available and the number of people who need them?
Perhaps a combination of a lower pace of building during the covid epidemic and the increasing number of immigrants coming in now has created the crunch, or at least exacerbated it. If that is the problem, in THEORY, the capitalist market should respond with an increase in building now, but it is not doing so. Why? Because the rapid rise in the interest rates has made it harder for developers to get loans to put up low income housing, even with the tax incentives handed out to get them to do this type of building.
A good platform for a Democratic candidate would be to increase these tax incentives and at the same time subsidize the rents for low income applicants, as well as offering 3 months free rent to recent immigrants while they look for jobs. The rent prices should be scaled to 40% of what a person earns taking a min wage job for 40 hours/week in the zip code of that apartment building. Again, the tax subsidies and developer loans would be financed by a wealth tax on Billionaires.
There would be a lag time of 1-2 years before the units start coming available, but that can be addressed as mentioned using the empty floors and buildings in the commercial RE market. Of course office space isn't perfect living space since it lacks showers and you would have to share bathrooms, but it's way better than Tents with no electricity or running water in the middle of nowhere.
What currently appears to be the case is that the big cities like NYC & Chicago are throwing up the tent cities as a political ploy to say they are doing SOMETHING, while in fact they are doing NOTHING. Venezuelan immigrants given rides out to these places have gotten right back on the bus to go back to the intake center, despite being told take it or leave it, otherwise you sleep in the street. It's a complete joke, there's no way to get to any jobs, no way for kids to go to school, nothing for anyone to do, etc. I'm not even sure what they are supposed to do for food. K-Rations?
Another question on my mind is why Venezuelans right now? What is going on there beyond the usual failed state stuff? Any news from there I missed out on?
RE
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: Nearings Fault on Nov 16, 2023, 09:51 AM
How about viewing all this from an energy lens. Maybe the era of the 1 bedroom apartment with kitchen, bathroom, living room for every single person, the least efficient mode of housing, is an artificial product of the age of cheap energy. The cracks have been papered over as long as possible but they can't hide now. Multi generational housing, boarding houses granny suites or just a room in an over shared house are going to have to make a comeback as we return to historical norms in terms of income and energy use. I don't worry about the housing shortage it's an artificial blip created by a wealthy generation that bought too much housing and is holding on too long thinking it's worth more than it is. What other things do you buy become more valuable as they ages? Why is a 40 year old house with a worn out furnace, mold filled duct work, electrical wiring chewed by rodents, soggy roof plywood etc worth more when old then new? Crazy.
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Nov 16, 2023, 11:35 AM
Quote from: Nearings Fault on Nov 16, 2023, 09:51 AMHow about viewing all this from an energy lens. Maybe the era of the 1 bedroom apartment with kitchen, bathroom, living room for every single person, the least efficient mode of housing, is an artificial product of the age of cheap energy.
Actually, the opposite is true. Because 1 bedroom units are usually built in large buildings, they are more efficient than rooms in single family homes. Fewer units have exterior facing walls. In fact when I lived at Creekwood Park, because my unit was surrounded by units on either side and had one above it, I actually almost never had to turn on my own furnace, enough heat came through the shared walls with my neighbors and little leaked out the ceiling to keep my unit warm enough. The bigger the building, the more floors and less roof space/unit, the more efficient in use of heat.
You could think of my current SNIF as just a very big one family house with 102 tiny bedrooms for the extended family of grandparents. All our little bedrooms surround common areas that17 of us share, like a big living room. All the cooking is done in one kitchen in large pots and ovens, saving energy from individually cooking meals, or even for meals for a big extended family like the Waltons.
A really efficient building for single people would have individual bedrooms and shared kitchens for a communal style of living. A well run old folks home like this one is a good model. The only thing wrong here is the medical industry and overpriced staffing administration and insurance costs. If it was reorganized so young healthy people could get a free room in exchange for helping out the old folks and old folks like me who still can do stuff were put to work we could run the place ourselves. I would love to run the kitchen here, it would be a blast. I actually met laast week with the chief cook to discuss some ideas and ways to change the menu and choices available. I could also easily handle the front dest and transportation scheduling, etc.
The single family home model is actually the least eefficient building method for energy efficiency. Bigger buildingss housing more people are much more efficient.
RE
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: Nearings Fault on Nov 16, 2023, 05:16 PM
Quote from: Nearings Fault on Nov 16, 2023, 09:51 AMHow about viewing all this from an energy lens. Maybe the era of the 1 bedroom apartment with kitchen, bathroom, living room for every single person, the least efficient mode of housing, is an artificial product of the age of cheap energy.
Actually, the opposite is true. Because 1 bedroom units are usually built in large buildings, they are more efficient than rooms in single family homes. Fewer units have exterior facing walls. In fact when I lived at Creekwood Park, because my unit was surrounded by units on either side and had one above it, I actually almost never had to turn on my own furnace, enough heat came through the shared walls with my neighbors and little leaked out the ceiling to keep my unit warm enough. The bigger the building, the more floors and less roof space/unit, the more efficient in use of heat.
You could think of my current SNIF as just a very big one family house with 102 tiny bedrooms for the extended family of grandparents. All our little bedrooms surround common areas that17 of us share, like a big living room. All the cooking is done in one kitchen in large pots and ovens, saving energy from individually cooking meals, or even for meals for a big extended family like the Waltons.
A really efficient building for single people would have individual bedrooms and shared kitchens for a communal style of living. A well run old folks home like this one is a good model. The only thing wrong here is the medical industry and overpriced staffing administration and insurance costs. If it was reorganized so young healthy people could get a free room in exchange for helping out the old folks and old folks like me who still can do stuff were put to work we could run the place ourselves. I would love to run the kitchen here, it would be a blast. I actually met laast week with the chief cook to discuss some ideas and ways to change the menu and choices available. I could also easily handle the front dest and transportation scheduling, etc.
The single family home model is actually the least eefficient building method for energy efficiency. Bigger buildingss housing more people are much more efficient.
RE
I won't argue that too much. So basically the dorm room model would be the most efficient. I would not be surprised if you start seeing some of that with the underused office space. In my own research one of the stumbling blocks of the transformation of office space turns out to be plumbing. Office buildings tend to have centralized plumbing which does not work when you want to turn it into 12 one bedrooms each with bathroom and kitchen. Dorm model? Much more doable. Individualized plumbing and cooking facilities are very inefficient and expensive. In defense of the single home in my world of rural living large buildings are very uncommon and a move to more centralized structures would take decades. Large underused homes though are very common here. A move to shared housing could be done relatively quickly and at very little cost. Right now I see the stumbling block to it being people being unwilling to give up their sense of entitlement to that space and lowering expectations of rentors. Lack of money to keep an apartment or home should alter those feelings in time. I don't feel bad about our space. There are 4 of us, it's a very efficient house and when the young things leave we have already discussed either creating an apartment downstairs or downsizing. We have to travel too much, we could probably pack a few more in here, grow more food ourselves etc. but I too suffer from my energy rich delusions. I've often thought about the medieval town surrounded by fields often with common walls between houses. Very efficient space wise, not much travel to get your resources. Maybe in our futures again. Cheers, NF
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: Surly1 on Nov 16, 2023, 06:44 PM
Quote from: RE on Nov 15, 2023, 06:32 AMSince private developers won't build affordable housing, a Goobermint home building company like the WPA should be assigned the resposibility for building single and double occupancy units in every major city equal to or greater than the number of immigrants that city is expected to accept each year.
While I applaud the image of banksters and developers either reduced to penury and/or swinging from lampposts, don't overlook the NIMBY factor. Every time a municipality down here tries to create "affordable" housing, the local civic leagues mount a hue and cry about how such a project would mean The End of the World as we Know It: not in my back yard. After all, it might house "those" people.
Some things never change. In America. the only unforgivable crime is to be poor.
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Nov 16, 2023, 11:54 PM
Quote from: RE on Nov 15, 2023, 06:32 AMSince private developers won't build affordable housing, a Goobermint home building company like the WPA should be assigned the resposibility for building single and double occupancy units in every major city equal to or greater than the number of immigrants that city is expected to accept each year.
While I applaud the image of banksters and developers either reduced to penury and/or swinging from lampposts, don't overlook the NIMBY factor. Every time a municipality down here tries to create "affordable" housing, the local civic leagues mount a hue and cry about how such a project would mean The End of the World as we Know It: not in my back yard. After all, it might house "those" people.
Some things never change. In America. the only unforgivable crime is to be poor.
Indeed, NIMBY is a big problem, which is why the Hooverville in NYC was plopped down on Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. It's an old airstrip all the way out on Jamaica bay which might be like 2 feet above sea level so as soon as you get a decent storm and a King Tide, all the migrants there will be washed out to sea. lol.
The Homeless Migrants are so low on the NIMBY scale, not even the people who live in the crime infested project housing in Brooklyn want them next door. There is no public transportation out there, no subway or bus service for miles. No stores, no schools, nada. You might as well be putting them in the middle of the sahara desert.
As you indicate, even for normal low income housing, "middle class" neighborhoods such as they exist anymore don't want them because their precious property value would decrease, because of course the next buyer doesn't want to live next to poor people. That's WHY people moved out of the cities to the suburbs, once you got rich enough to afford one of the tract houses built on Long Island after WWII, you left your apartment in Brooklyn for new poor immigrants to move into.
Now of course nobody currently in those apts can afford to move out of them to new McMansions out in the burbs, both because theey are unaffordable and because there is almost no room left for new subdivisions. All the farmland that had been on LI before WWII has been completely gobbled up, all the way out to Montauk.
So the only real solution here is to increase the density of the buildings, which means taking the single family homes still in parts of Brooklyn and Queens, razing them and putting up multi story buildings. Nobody who owns a house in such a neighborhood wants that now, because no matter how much a developer pays for their plot of land, it's not going to be enough to buy anything close to what they would be selling.
NYC itself has had the same 8M or so population size my whole life. The only increase in population has been in the "Greater NY Area", which is about a 25 mile radius around Manhattan and includes all the "Bridge & Tunnel" people from NJ, LI and Westchester County.The only way to increase the population housing capacity would be to raze the single family homes in places like Nassau County and Hoboken and on Staten Island. The Boomers who own those homes won't sell them, they'll leave them in their wills for their favorite Gen Z Great Grandchild.
Too many people want to move in to NY from around the world, just like they always have. The difference today is the people who have been living there no longer have better places to move to as they become richer. Everywhere else is too expensive to replace what they have, and there aren't great new high paying job opportunities elsewhere to attract most of them, particularly retired Boomers.
Basically, some other city should be picked to send all these folks to after they cross the border. Maybe some old Rust Belt cities like Cleveland or Buffalo have room to build some new low income housing. Any job opportunities in those place? Well, no, that's why they are rust belt cities! lol.
Since this is only the beginning of the Collapse of Industrial Civilization, things will be getting worse before they get better. Much worse. Enjoy this moment. 10 years from now these will be the Good Old Days.
RE
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Nov 17, 2023, 12:51 AM
It is definitely the best model in an idealized world where everybody gets along well and does their share. Unfortunately in the real world those last two caveats aren't necessarily true unless all the people in such a housing model have some commonality, like they are all members of the same religious cult. lol.
Taking your example of Dormitory style living, at Columbia one of the dorms actually built by Barnard (the sister college for women back before they went coed) Plimpton Hall had 4 suites with 2 shared bedrooms each all surrounding a central kitchen/dining are. The problem for all my friends who lived there was that all 16 people sharing the kitchen were not equally good about washing their dishes and cleaning the fridge of old leftovers, or picking up the beer cans from the last party. It follows the 80-20 rule, where 80% of the work gets done by 20% of the people, who eventually tire of cleaning up after the slobs. Same problem with cleaning the shared bathrooms, though there only 4 people shared each of the 4 bathrooms.
Once you get to the size of a really big commune like my SNIF for 102 people, you have to have paid staff for the Housekeeping aspect, and that would be true even if the place wasn't populated by old folks and cripples who can't mop floors and scrub toilets. If it was a cult commune with a really strong David Koresh running the place, he might be able to assign work details and threaten lazy culties with going to hell if they didn't keep the toilets clean on their turn in the rotation, but without some type of enforcement you can never get this sort of scut work done in a large group of unrelated people. In the military, if you don't get your job on KP done, you'll get some time in the brig. Screw up enough, you'll get a dishonorable discharge, a nasty thing to have on your record on a par with being a convicted felon even after you serve your prison sentence.
I do think in an area like yours with houses of 4 or 5 bedrooms, it would be a good idea to develop friendships with neighbors of similar age, and when the kids have all grown up, pick one of the bigger nicer houses with good common areas and share it with 2 or 3 other retired couples or singles, since some spouses will die off and there are divorces etc. You could help each other with less need for old age homes and paid PCAs. Could you envision making friends around there you could do that with?
RE
Title: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: Nearings Fault on Nov 17, 2023, 03:50 AM
It is definitely the best model in an idealized world where everybody gets along well and does their share. Unfortunately in the real world those last two caveats aren't necessarily true unless all the people in such a housing model have some commonality, like they are all members of the same religious cult. lol.
Taking your example of Dormitory style living, at Columbia one of the dorms actually built by Barnard (the sister college for women back before they went coed) Plimpton Hall had 4 suites with 2 shared bedrooms each all surrounding a central kitchen/dining are. The problem for all my friends who lived there was that all 16 people sharing the kitchen were not equally good about washing their dishes and cleaning the fridge of old leftovers, or picking up the beer cans from the last party. It follows the 80-20 rule, where 80% of the work gets done by 20% of the people, who eventually tire of cleaning up after the slobs. Same problem with cleaning the shared bathrooms, though there only 4 people shared each of the 4 bathrooms.
Once you get to the size of a really big commune like my SNIF for 102 people, you have to have paid staff for the Housekeeping aspect, and that would be true even if the place wasn't populated by old folks and cripples who can't mop floors and scrub toilets. If it was a cult commune with a really strong David Koresh running the place, he might be able to assign work details and threaten lazy culties with going to hell if they didn't keep the toilets clean on their turn in the rotation, but without some type of enforcement you can never get this sort of scut work done in a large group of unrelated people. In the military, if you don't get your job on KP done, you'll get some time in the brig. Screw up enough, you'll get a dishonorable discharge, a nasty thing to have on your record on a par with being a convicted felon even after you serve your prison sentence.
I do think in an area like yours with houses of 4 or 5 bedrooms, it would be a good idea to develop friendships with neighbors of similar age, and when the kids have all grown up, pick one of the bigger nicer houses with good common areas and share it with 2 or 3 other retired couples or singles, since some spouses will die off and there are divorces etc. You could help each other with less need for old age homes and paid PCAs. Could you envision making friends around there you could do that with?
RE
The golden girls model is actively being discussed by 3 women in their 60-70's who all live in their own homes up the road a bit. All 3 are older farmhouses with land all just leased out for hay. It's a collosal holding of resources country style. Each property when originally constructed about 100 years ago housed large farm families and produced enough food to feed them all which a surplus. Now they grow hay for cows and horses, trees, and house widows who due to much better economic times have the money to hold onto these places. Meanwhile all the kids moved because there was no place to live and no jobs (ag jobs could exist but they are very demanding in terms of time and labour). It's the rural reality I have observed brought on by cheap energy.
Title: Re: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Dec 09, 2023, 01:04 AM
US homelessness up 12% to highest reported level as rents soar and coronavirus pandemic aid lapses
RE
Title: Re: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Dec 18, 2023, 08:21 AM
QuoteAs long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution to the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers.
— Friedrich Engels, 1872
QuoteHomelessness exists not because the system is not working but because this is the way it works.
— Peter Marcuse
The way the system works, people have to be kept afraid. Very afraid. Behave and stay in line or feel the wrath.
The wrath of MONEY. You prevent the accumulation of large piles by those whom MONEY has made their servant and bad shit shall happen to you. Suffer and facilitate the accumulation of large piles by those who have them and your meaningless life will be more pleasant. Dissent and you can sleep in a car.
(https://www.al.com/resizer/ZN3KNCvu139eesHaEHfsltWcVAg=/1280x0/smart/advancelocal-adapter-image-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/image.al.com/home/bama-media/width2048/img/wire/photo/chimp-file-photojpg-ff2e1653c2e1306c.jpg) Give me your shit, you stupid Bonobo. My pile is bigger than yours. It is the system.
You whine about equality, saving as many as you can. All dogs eat, or some such. You Binobos don't understand you are a different species. We are in charge.
And we don't give a fuck about what happens to you. And the funny thing is, you don't seem to mind. So many of you are wannabe tyrants yourselves that you think being pushed around is normal and right.
And we partay on!
Title: Re: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Dec 18, 2023, 12:26 PM
If only that were true! Unfortunately, in most places sleeping in your car is illegal. The issue here is that there are NO free places to sleep legally in cities besides the perpetually too few "shelters" which rarely offer a safe storage place for personal possessions. So you ALWAYS have to have enough money to have a place to live. Given that half the population lives paycheck to paycheck, it's guaranteed you will always have a percentage of people who are out of work, followed swiftly by out of money, followed then by out on the street.
It used to be every city had ghettos/slums/favelas where you could find a dilapidated building to squat on. In cities like NY though, even slums are rented out by somebody, like Trump's dad. The Big Apple has a massive shelter system, however even that is overwhelmed by the fact refugees flock there because of that system. So that also is overwhelmed.
The reality is even with the anti-vagrancy laws on the books, there's no way you could imprison all the people in need of housing either. So cities give out bus tickets to another town. At least you get to sleep on the bus.
RE
Title: Re: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: John of Wallan on Dec 18, 2023, 06:27 PM
My son has a small homeless tent city next to the biggest shopping centre in the southern hemisphere... Just started last 12 months as interest rates are biting... Not coincidentally, ABC headline: Australian migrant population growth hits all-time high as borders reopen
Gee, I wonder why people cant find a rental let alone a house they can afford.... Need to grow to keep the ponzi scheme going. Need more taxes. Need more cheap labour. Need to prop up asset prices. Fuck society and the environment.
JOW
Title: Re: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Dec 19, 2023, 02:17 AM
Not surprisingly. malls and shopping districts are always where the homeless set up their tents. Since they mostly do not own cars, they need to live somewhere close to where they can acquire food. Which then makes you wonder why NYC, which has decades of experience with the homeless, would try and set up a big homeless encampment on Floyd Bennett airfield, miles from the nearest shopping? I suppose they must bring in food each day to feed the residents, but it's hard to imagine just how awful that stuff is. Then they also plug in a no alcohol rule. So you can't get a beer, or cigarettes either. They can't really expect this to succeed, can they?
QuoteJust started last 12 months as interest rates are biting... Not coincidentally, ABC headline: Australian migrant population growth hits all-time high as borders reopen
Gee, I wonder why people cant find a rental let alone a house they can afford.... Need to grow to keep the ponzi scheme going. Need more taxes. Need more cheap labour. Need to prop up asset prices. Fuck society and the environment.
All the standard reasons why Economic Growth is required, except no matter how much you grow, the problems never go away, they just get bigger. Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
So what we have here repeated thousands of times over is people leaving one place which is failing for one reason or another and piling in somewhere else until it gets overwhelmed. There's no planning at all, I suppose under the assumption the Wisdom of the Market will take care of it. Except it never does take care of it.
I wonder how long before the homeless situation reaches Critical Mass? At some point riots will break out. I wonder if an AI program can model that?
RE
[/quote]
Title: New York’s ‘Right to Shelter’ No Longer Exists for Thousands of Migrants
Post by: RE on Dec 19, 2023, 06:26 AM
122,100 people in the Homeless Shelter system in NYC! That is 4X the population of Fairbanks, and half the population of Anchorage. Then, how many people don't even bother to try and find a shelter bed? How many people currently couch surfing? How many riding the subway 24/7?
This seems awfully close to critical mass to me. What would they do if all 122K people Occupied Park Avenue? Or better yet since it's indoors, Grand Central Station? Then the stockbrokers wouldn't be able to commute in from Westchester and Greenwich.
Anyhow, this situation can't last long without something going off the rails.
New York's 'Right to Shelter' No Longer Exists for Thousands of Migrants
RE
Title: Re: Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Dec 19, 2023, 06:22 PM
QuoteFor months, Mayor Adams has argued the city's "right to shelter" is an antiquated rule that was more than New Yorker's could afford to maintain on behalf of an unprecedented number of new arrivals.
(https://chasingthesquirrel.com/public/pics/buddyjesus.png) Don't worry about it K-Dog. Leave the karma to me.
There is too much pain to tolerate being called antiquated. I'll take care of it.
Come Christmas the dude is going to have the 'bit o beef' indigestion treatment. Ebenzerer Scrooge style. (https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.twinkl.co.uk%2Ftw1n%2Fimage%2Fprivate%2Fs--1Si8Hh3e--%2Fc_fill%2Cq_auto%3Aeco%2Cw_600%2Fv1%2Fcreate%2Flibrary%2FEbenezer-Scrooge--Man-Person-Victorian-Charles-Dickens-MPS-KS2.png&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=e74c0f104a65c3add7cceddb3c99858a219c35d317915090273a1026bdb6c29f&ipo=images) He will have dreams.
Title: EARTHQUAKE at the Border- "No Captain, Battle Formations"
Post by: RE on Dec 29, 2023, 10:22 AM
Now they know why the property was so cheap.
Jerry Shuster, who is an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, said the newcomers had cut down all his trees and dismantled his fence to use as firewood to keep warm at night.
"The migrants have more rights than we do," said Maria Shuster, claiming that federal authorities and the local sheriff's department have told her they are unable to remove the hordes of strangers from their property.
San Diego-area residents say migrants camping in yards, piling trash nightly: 'This is ridiculous'
RE
Title: U.S. border officials on track to process over 300,000 migrants in December
Post by: RE on Dec 31, 2023, 11:25 AM
At least it's providing steady work for bus drivers from Texas to Chicago.
Until and unless they get deported, that's an additional 300K Homeless people each month, 3.6M/year. That's more than twice the population of Phoenix. By the time of the POTUS election, there will be easy 1M refugees in Concentration Camps or 1M begging on the streets of NYC, Chicago, Boston, SF & LA,neither alternative of which bodes well for Uncle Joe's reelection campaign.
2024 is shaping up to be an exciting year in collapse.
U.S. border officials on track to process over 300,000 migrants in December, the highest monthly tally on record
RE
Title: Fear and loathing at Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field
Post by: RE on Jan 14, 2024, 12:34 PM
Love the Hunter Thompson title. ;D Dr. Gonzo would have had a field day with this.
As mentioned in prior posts, the NYC Solution to their burgeoning migrant and homeless crisis, the state run Tent City they set up at Floyd Bennett Airfield is turning into a complete clusterfuck. They recently had to evacuate all the residents to a Brooklyn HS during a storm which threatened to blow down all the tents. Classes had to be cancelled, pissing off the local residents who depend on this for babysitting. The refugees complained about the food, lack of services and anything to do. Now, petty crime is on thee increase and the runway smells like reefer. The prohibition of drugs and alcohol apparently is being ignored. Big surprise there.
What is really sad is despite the fact it's a failure on just about every level, nobody has even hinted at shutting it down or what they are doing to create something at least marginally better. What are they going to do with the next 2000 refugees? The airfield I believe is now at it's designed capacity. Buses are still arriving from TX every day.
Clearly thee folks need to be spread out and directed to other cities. Yet all you hear about are NY, Chicago and LA as "sanctuary cities". Basically, every city with a population over about 200K should have to take a few. Subuutbs also should have to take some. There are whole countries like Venezuela evacuating people. You can't jam them all into a couple of big shities here.
Amazing how fast dominoes can start to fall in a collapse.
As mentioned in prior posts, the NYC Solution to their burgeoning migrant and homeless crisis, the state run Tent City they set up at Floyd Bennett Airfield is turning into a complete clusterfuck. They recently had to evacuate all the residents to a Brooklyn HS during a storm which threatened to blow down all the tents. Classes had to be cancelled, pissing off the local residents who depend on this for babysitting. The refugees complained about the food, lack of services and anything to do. Now, petty crime is on thee increase and the runway smells like reefer. The prohibition of drugs and alcohol apparently is being ignored. Big surprise there.
What is really sad is despite the fact it's a failure on just about every level, nobody has even hinted at shutting it down or what they are doing to create something at least marginally better. What are they going to do with the next 2000 refugees? The airfield I believe is now at it's designed capacity. Buses are still arriving from TX every day.
Clearly thee folks need to be spread out and directed to other cities. Yet all you hear about are NY, Chicago and LA as "sanctuary cities". Basically, every city with a population over about 200K should have to take a few. Subuutbs also should have to take some. There are whole countries like Venezuela evacuating people. You can't jam them all into a couple of big shities here.
Amazing how fast dominoes can start to fall in a collapse.
QuoteAt Target in nearby Kings Plaza, one security guard estimated up to 10 migrants a day swipe bread, rice, and other groceries.
The Horror
Typical minor complaints from local residents and biz owners, but the point is that it's not a viable situation for anybody. You can't just dump 2000 people into a neighborhood living in tents with nothing to do except make trouble with each other and the locals. There's no plan for moving them on to something besides an Army tent and MREs for food. They've already been there since November, by the time summer rolls around everybody's gonna be fed up with it. They have porta-potties, but where are these folks showering? The place is going to stink in the summer when everybody is sweating on the tarmac.
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jan 16, 2024, 10:08 AM
QuoteAt Target in nearby Kings Plaza, one security guard estimated up to 10 migrants a day swipe bread, rice, and other groceries.
The Horror
Typical minor complaints from local residents and biz owners, but the point is that it's not a viable situation for anybody. You can't just dump 2000 people into a neighborhood living in tents with nothing to do except make trouble with each other and the locals. There's no plan for moving them on to something besides an Army tent and MREs for food. They've already been there since November, by the time summer rolls around everybody's gonna be fed up with it. They have porta-potties, but where are these folks showering? The place is going to stink in the summer when everybody is sweating on the tarmac.
RE
I totally agree, but in America you get what you earn. That is common mythology as opposed to getting something for nothing which is the actual American state of things. These migrant people who have earned nothing get shit. They can live on a runway with nothing to do because that is what they deserve.
Now I take my Merican hat off and say this attitude is fucked up. Besides being untrue.
Calling the runway camp a solution gives it too much credit. The runway camp was set up because the migrants were bussed up from southern states to give the northern states a fair share of the migrant goodness. Something that would be an actual solution would bus the migrants, give income to all, and jobs to those who can work. A program would be set up with the task of integrating the migrants into society. Free education would be part of the package. Housing would be provided.
Which of course can't happen because then we would have to treat our own citizens like we treat migrants and America would be socialist.
Our system does not allow magnanimity. Our system is mean and brutal, with only vestiges of attempts to make it fair fading away under the political pressure of Fascism Lite and MAGA. Fairness is not part of the money game. Exploitation is.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jan 16, 2024, 09:01 PM
Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 16, 2024, 10:08 AMSomething that would be an actual solution would bus the migrants, give income to all, and jobs to those who can work. A program would be set up with the task of integrating the migrants into society. Free education would be part of the package. Housing would be provided.
There was a story a while back about some Billionaire who was buying up land to build an entirely new city. Why not pick some location and give them building materials and tools and let new immigrants build themselves a city? Call it "New Start City".
Anybody including current citizens could go to NSC as long as they can use a hammer or drill and build. Have some kind of standard plan for the housing units that is modular and units can be stacked up as more people come in. Once you get the housing going, then they can start biznesses using their own currency, and all that gets sent in is food and waste removed. Eventually, it transitions to a regular city and they develop a dollar economy to generate income to buy food. A 10 year plan.
Won't happen of course.
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jan 16, 2024, 09:27 PM
That is a great idea and it would work. From day one these people would have purpose in their lives. Knowing the end result is parity with regular Americans would make the place clean and law abiding very quickly. The residents would do it.
Your solution addresses human need and does not warehouse people like the runway solution, which is a sure way to breed a criminal society. Give young men nothing to do, and they will find something to do. And it won't be good. The humiliation of living on a runway would twist me.
Your plan has no chance of being implemented. Reactionaries will see that your approach encourages migration. Their solution uses bullets and is much cheaper. Capitalism makes decisions without consideration of humanity, so the bullet approach will be the solution given current conditions. A capitalist oligarchy resembles a feudal state. Kings did not welcome outsiders and give them help. Oligarchs are kings.
Current conditions which the Diner would like to see CHANGED.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jan 17, 2024, 06:44 AM
Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 16, 2024, 09:27 PMThat is a great idea and it would work. From day one these people would have purpose in their lives. Knowing the end result is parity with regular Americans would make the place clean and law abiding very quickly. The residents would do it.
Your solution addresses human need and does not warehouse people like the runway solution, which is a sure way to breed a criminal society. Give young men nothing to do, and they will find something to do. And it won't be good. The humiliation of living on a runway would twist me.
Besides the obvious political resistance you would get, the biggest logistical problem would be finding a location to drop New Start City.
Let's project its Maximum Size at 100,000 refugees. Since last month 30,000 crossed the border in TX, that's a little over 3 months, but some of them have other places to go already, relatives or friends who got here before. So say it can absorb new arrivals for 4 months.
The location therefore needs a water supply that can supply drinking water for 100,000. This water needs to either be piped in from a current water treatment facility that has enough excess capacity, or you will have to dig new wells to supply a new facility unless it's near a ground water supply like a big lake or river. Only other way would be to truck in bottled water. That would be pretty expensive.
Gray water for washing and bathing could be used directly if the source water is reasonably free of ag runoff or industrial chemicals, and that could be seperate. You would need enough water for that also.
So the 1st question is where in the FSoA is there enough undeveloped land close enough to an adequate water supply for NSC? Lot's of land in the desert, but no water. No good. Most locations that have the water supply necessary already have cities or towns built there. The only places I can think of that aren't built up are mountainous regions where building roads is difficult. Also difficult to build the housing, you'll need to have heavy equipment to level out building pads for the modular homes. I would make the basic unit 16'x16', for 256 sqft per person. 8'x16' modules for each additional person in a family unit. The parts for the modules thus fit nicely on a typical semi trailer. Wall panels would already have the electrical conduit and plumbing pipe fittings, so you just snap it together with cordless drills. Bathroom comes as a 4'x4' module with a composting toilet. Kitchen a 4'x8' module with sink, 2 burner electric stovetop, microwave/convection oven and small refrigerator/freezer.
So, now in addition to finding the location, you'll need heavy equipment for leveling pads and a cement mixer for pouring foundations. You'll need a large building onsite where the module parts can be assembled.
Even though all this will obviously cost money, I'm sure it would be cheaper than what NY is spending right now on their shelter system, which is in the $Billions$.
Identifying a possible location is the first big hurdle. Anybody got an idea on a spot?
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jan 17, 2024, 10:08 AM
Trying to find an unpopulated area with enough water in the west is difficult.
Find run down areas like Camden, New Jersey. Level this shit to the ground, then get the residents to work building new housing. They can help with the demolition. Give them something to do. It will take a few weeks to define Allen Town like floor-plans for new housing modules and get what is essentially an employee owned corporation managed by the government for their benefit set up. The bricks in this picture could be cleaned and pallets sent to every Home Depot in the country. They would sell. The city will drain money at first. In time the city will pay taxes.
It becomes half refugee camp and half new city under construction. In in two or three years the refugee camp is gone and only a new city remains. A new city of new tax payers who can help fund the next wave of rebuilding.
We have the slums:
1 Camden New Jersey 2 Detroit, Michigan 3 Flint, Michigan 4 East St. Louis, Illinois 5 Baltimore, Maryland 6 Gary Indiana
Six from the top of my head. There are more.
Looking harder: The document matches the area in the photo. The buildings are already down. This does not matter. The Brownfield area is only an example.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jan 17, 2024, 11:46 AM
The water supply is already in place & sewage too. So good there.
Don't think it would be self sufficient economically in 3 years. The reason Camden, Detroit and all the rest of those neighborhoods look like that is because there are no jobs there. Rust belt cities where all the manufacturing left 50 years ago. You would have to get some billionaires to put some kind of manufacturing or distribution centers or something. Not sure what because we are headed for recession.
RE
Title: Camden
Post by: K-Dog on Jan 17, 2024, 12:09 PM
QuoteYou would have to get some billionaires to put some kind of manufacturing or distribution centers or something.
Can we do it without the billionaires? Yes the plan MUST provide jobs, but billionaires want short term profit. There will be no profit for a few years. Investments take a while to pay off, nothing new about that. I would know, billionaires are overrated. All they really are are regular people with a lot of money. There is no special genius there.
Better we set up state funded companies on the tax dollar until the place can actually pay taxes. A planned economy, professionally managed. Like what the Israelis should have been doing in Gaza, but didn't.
If the mob can build Las Vegas, we can rebuild the ghetto.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jan 17, 2024, 02:35 PM
Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 17, 2024, 12:09 PMBetter we set up state funded companies on the tax dollar until the place can actually pay taxes. A planned economy, professionally managed. Like what the Israelis should have been doing in Gaza, but didn't.
I'm fine with financing it through the state, but what would these companies DO? After they finish building their homes, you have the same problem in Camden they had where they came from. There's nothing in Camden anybody outside Camden needs or wants. No way to get dollars flowing in to Camden.
You could create a state run company to make say Wind Turbines, but those are produced elsewhere already, so unless you sell the ones from Camden cheaper, they won't sell. This is the fundamental problem of a dying industrial economy.
RE
Title: Folding Tiny Home: Winner RE's Homeless Shelter Award
Post by: RE on Jan 19, 2024, 02:55 AM
Love this design. I've played with it myself on Sketch as a DIY project starting with a 20' flatbed trailer. I figured I could build it for about $30K just for the shell but not with the servo motors you wold need to make it open at the touch of a button. Also without the bathroom and kitchen appliances and alarm and solar panels/electrics. The $85K price for the complete unit is great.
If I was healthy, I probably would have built it for my retirement travelling Chattaqua show. Definitely something I would recommend as a prep if you can afford it. Take it anywhere to get out of the way of a wildfire, hurricane or flood.
With the press of a button, this tiny house folds into a box that you can tow anywhere
Title: Atlanta’s Squatter Problem Is Vexing Wall Street Landlords
Post by: RE on Jan 25, 2024, 03:15 PM
Wow, I feel really bad for those poor landlords, don't you? It's just horrible how these homeless people will go live in their vacation rental properties! Can you imagine the nerve of these people!
Personally, I'm surprised there isn't more squatting going on. NYC has 50% vacancy rate in office buildings. Whole floors are empty. Gotta be better than sleeping on the street.
Atlanta's Squatter Problem Is Vexing Wall Street Landlords
RE
Title: Housing is now unaffordable for a record half of all U.S. renters, study finds
Post by: RE on Jan 26, 2024, 07:19 AM
There's a shortage of affordable housing, and the solution the Market comes up with is to build MOAR unaffordable apartments! If you missed my Where have all the Houses Gone? (https://globalcollapse.wordpress.com/2024/01/04/where-have-all-the-houses-gone/) blog, I wrote about this stupidity a few weeks ago.
A Goobermint that had any CFS would have put out subsidies and tax credits for builders to be putting up new apartments that would rent in the $500-1000 range a year ago, which is more in line with the prevailing wage these days which is around $20/hr. Mickey Ds pays $18 around here, CNAs get a little more. This grosses around $36K, $1000/mo rent is $12K. That's 33%. You still have lots of other fixed expenses of course, so if you are left a few hundred to keep the economy going with an occasional movie you're doing good. $1500/mo rent leaves you nothing or negative.
The longer this goes on, the worse the crash is gonna be when it comes. With the POTUS election and the border crisis, this summer loooks ripe for a breaking point to be hit.
Housing is now unaffordable for a record half of all U.S. renters, study finds
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: TDoS on Jan 26, 2024, 04:27 PM
Quote from: RE on Jan 26, 2024, 07:19 AMhttps://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1225957874/housing-unaffordable-for-record-half-all-u-s-renters-study-finds Housing is now unaffordable for a record half of all U.S. renters, study finds RE
As a point of logic, if 50% of US housing is unaffordable for renters, and there must be millions of renters in the country...does it follow that the homeless population, recently measured at something like 750,000 or so....has increased to millions more? And no one has noticed?
Is it fair to theorize that a word like "unaffordable" being used when evidence doesn't substantiate its use is just more proof of everything everywhere all at once having been degraded by the Internet and Joe Averages running amuck and bringing down public discourse to the level of 2nd graders? Only because 2nd graders haven't learned the nuance of many words yet and could be expected to say silly things at their age.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jan 26, 2024, 06:28 PM
Quote from: TDoS on Jan 26, 2024, 04:27 PMAs a point of logic, if 50% of US housing is unaffordable for renters, and there must be millions of renters in the country...does it follow that the homeless population, recently measured at something like 750,000 or so....has increased to millions more? And no one has noticed?
No, because unaffordable doesn't mean you don't have income enough to pay the rent, it means that once you do pay rent there's not enough left over to cover the rest of your normal bills, so you start having to choose between having a roof and having heat, or having a roof and having food.
For renters making under $30,000 — who already faced the most severe struggle to afford housing — Airgood-Obrycki "didn't think it could possibly get that much higher." But the report found it did nudge up, to an all-time high of 83% who are cost-burdened. She says the amount of money they have left over for all other household expenses has plummeted by nearly half, to just $310 a month.
Good luck paying your utilities, car insurance, phone & food on $310/mo.
Generally,rent is figured to be 30-40% of your income, but when you make $30K and rent is 80% of your income, it is unaffordable. Not enough left over to live on. Not the same thing as homeless.
RE
Title: Record number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent, report finds
Post by: RE on Jan 26, 2024, 08:01 PM
In my prior post, I said the general rule of thumb was 30-40% of income goes to rent. This based on my experience that Property Mgmt companies won't approve you as a renter if the cost of the Apartment exceeds that. However, the FSoA Dept of Housing $ Urban Development says otherwise:
Tenants should generally allocate no more than 30% of their income toward rent, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
One of the few places I ever got that low was the place I lived longest up here before I lost my leg which was before covid and the housing crunch, which was low income housing with rents adjusted for income and came in at 25%. It killed me to give up that place, it was perfect for me.
I finally got some good newz from Cook Inlet Housing, run by the Native corporation up here but offers units to white folks too if you're old and crippled along with poor, and I probably am down to about 6 more months of waiting time for a building right near the SNIF here, having been on their list for a year already. So 18 months total if it comes through of waiting. Rent on that one will come in at about 35%, but I think it includes utilities.
It's almost impossible to get rent below the federal guidelines for affordability if you make less than around $35K, even in low income housing, which all have long wait lists now. Past $35K, you no longer qualify for this housing and have to rent in the open market, so to get down to 30%, your income has to jump up to around $45K. $35-45K is no man's land, you don't qualify for low income housing and open market prices are 40% of income and up. It's not until you make around $50K that it becomes fairly easy to find places you can afford, although they are probably going to be smaller or in trashier neighborhoods than a person with this income usually would expect. This is typical teacher salary around here or construction workers. They make more hourly, but winter is very slow and they take lower paid work from Nov-Apr, so it drops the annual total.
Open market housing is risky, because when you rent it originally it might have been affordable, but when your lease is up the rentier jacks up the rent to the prevailing rate, which has been rising faster than inflation. So maybe you were paying $1300 and after 2 years your new bill comes in the mail for $1600, a 20%+ hike. Your rent is now unaffordable, although you are not homeless...yet. At this point you cut back on going to the movies and eat more spaghetti at home. But then your transmission goes and you put $2K on the credit card. Add a $100 monthly payment to try and pay that off. Now you're negative every month and on your way to homeless, though it will take some time still before you miss a month's rent.
This is the status of a large portion of the population at the moment, right on the edge where if one thing goes wrong, the dominoes start to fall. Once they do realize they have to find somewhere cheaper to live, they start looking but there's nothing out there they qualify for. They're not homeless but they can't afford the available housing.
Record number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent, report findsRecord number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent, report finds
RE
Title: Maybe that guy from Argentina can help.
Post by: K-Dog on Jan 26, 2024, 10:02 PM
Calling it an affordability crisis is not dealing with reality.
Affordability crisis means let the market decide. Build more housing, force the price down. BUT WHATEVER YOU DO DON"T CHANGE THE SYSTEM. Those who own do not want to be like everyone else. Plan on keeping the owning game going. The cretins who think this is the only way to run a society far outnumber you.
'In May, the Biden administration announced a Housing Supply Action Plan to close the affordability gap and ease housing costs. The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing and incentivizing areas to reform zoning and land use policies to build more lower-cost housing. It also calls for homebuilders to adopt more efficient construction methods.
What a crock of shit. The cost of building housing is not the issue. The economy is dead is the issue. There is not enough cheap energy to keep the complexity of life going as we know it. Jobs are not paying enough, and landlords expect to be paid regardless. Reforming zoning sounds good and the resourceful bullshitter can find examples where it would help no doubt. But greed, not zoning is the issue. Zoning did not create the housing crisis. The price of housing was allowed to inflate to obscene levels. Everybody in for the past 50 years in America has wanted to get rich owning real estate. And real estate is how the rich get richer. It is their preferred method. The system is rotten to the core. Through the years is has been housing bubble after housing bubble. Emphasis has never been on home ownership.
Mortgage payments are perpetually confused with home ownership. It pisses me off that there are so many feeble minded people that can be bought off with 'affordability crisis'! Home ownership begins when the mortgage is gone. Not when people are rewarded for refinancing.
The market destroyed things but the faithful expect a market to fix things. This could rightfully pass as a definition of insanity.
'The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing.
In other words loan some rich people money to build more housing. Make it a good investment for everybody who already has money. Financing to the rescue. What a relief! After thirty years of financing destroying things, and increasing inequality it is good to know financing has a change of heart.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jan 27, 2024, 03:06 AM
Right here is the fundamental stupidity perpetuated with housing;
The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing
"Financing" doesn't make housing more affordable. The only things you can change with financing are the length of the loan and the interest rate. The interest rate is determined by the federal funds rate the banks borrow money at +2% or so so they profit on the spread. Da Fed manipulates this to control inflation, so if it's at 5%, mortgages are gonna be 7% or more for a riskier borrower. Term lengths are already at 30 years, if you go to 40 years that's approaching the lifespan of houses, which is about 50 yeas on average. Except in the rare cases of historic homes that have been meticulously maintained, by the time a house is this old it has accumulated so many issue with plumbing, mold, roofing and rot it's cheaper to raze it and build new than to try and fix everything up. A 40 year term isn't home ownership, it's rental. It's multigenerational to pay off a 40 year mortgage.
If you look at most houses built in the 70s in Wonder Years type suburbs, they used cheap materials and have been through a dozen different "owners" over their history of varying dedication to maintenance. Nobody ever paid the house off, it just kept getting resold with new mortgages handed out at ever higher prices. These places are now all substandard housing in the rental market as "affordable housing". People buying a house don't want them, they want new houses with new appliances and the latest in insulation and heating systems. Financing tricks aren't going to make the new houses any more affordable.
The only way you are going to get affordable housing is to build homes with the target rental price determined before you build it. No idea what the square footage and materials cost is to build something like town homes with 1-3 bedrooms, but they have to rent out at $500-1500 per unit depending on the #bedrooms. Those were the prices at my old Creekwood apartments.
We had all demographics there from young families to old folks, all low income. Enough safe space for the kids to go outside and play. I don't see why we can't just put up more buildings with this type of plan instead of keep building single family McMansions.
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jan 27, 2024, 11:31 AM
Quoteinstead of keep building single family McMansions.
The free market runs on greed not need. McMansions put the most dollars in a builders pocket. People will generally not do anything without an incentive and the incentive to build housing that meets social needs is not there.
Unless welfare for the rich is involved the current administration will not help. The DNC evolved to help people above my income demographic. I am on the low end of the constituency that benefits from DNC policies. Republicans attract the dirt poor and the ultra rich. In other words the stupid and the stupid. Skipping me altogether.
My analysis may be off, but claiming neither political party supports most of society is not wrong. We only have two parties that matter. The Overton window moved. Power to the people is passé. Our parties support the rich or the ultra-rich. If you are neither, you support one of these parties because you don't like to think. And you do what you are told. And you are stupid.
Seriously if you are pissed at being called stupid because you are a Republican or a Democrat I have to say: Waiting until homelessness is in the millions, and houses cost five times what they would in an affordable society is fucking stupid.
A society that a working man or woman can live in is an affordable society. The only kind that is just. And people are just starting to care about this now?
Power to the people did not happen. Nobody ever paid off the mortgage and just lived. Nobody meaning in a collective sense. I am an exception. Consequently housing inflated in a capitalist useless eater bubble. Maybe the biggest of all time in America. And here we are. Sodom and Gomorrah. This is what happens when everyone seeks unearned riches.
Tulip mania was 'bigger' but you don't need tulips to live. They can be eaten or looked at, and that is all.
Housing is different. People need housing and houses cost at least five times what they would cost to be affordable where I live. This one sold three days ago. I would bet $100 the new residents will be from mainland China. <- Seriously, in a heartbeat.
This is how conventional DNC wisdom fights global heating. Move rich people around the world. Somehow this stimulates the economy. Or maybe it just moves rich people around the world?
The house is a tenth of a mile away. At $2,145,000 it is more than five times what an average American with an average job can afford. America is now a club and to be a proper member of the club you need to have a few hundred thousand in unearned riches.
I don't generally care where I get an image that supports what I write, but this time it is appropriate I do. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-31/are-house-prices-falling-from-sydney-to-new-york (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-31/are-house-prices-falling-from-sydney-to-new-york)
The article is old (and wrong), but it had the picture I wanted.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jan 27, 2024, 12:46 PM
I wonder what would happen if a rule was in place so that if you bought a home you could not sell it for a year without a serious financial penalty. Personal need to sell being guaranteed if a person met certain 'rules'. Rules in this case only making sure you are not a speculator. A person working or retired living in a home and not pretending to do so but actually doing so could sell at any time.
People buying a home to live in would not care, but speculative buying and selling would end.
And quickly.
Would the Democrats support such a plan? The plan actually makes 'de market' more free. Speculators do not make a market free, and the idea that speculators enable price seeking is total bullshit. Speculative action corrupts a proper market.
Hell no, the Democrats would NOT. This interferes with personal FREEDUM to seek unearned riches. And this thought experiment shows the 'blue' hat is no more than a red MAGA hat in disguise. Membership in an exclusive club.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: TDoS on Jan 27, 2024, 01:02 PM
Quote from: K-Dog on Jan 26, 2024, 10:02 PM'In May, the Biden administration announced a Housing Supply Action Plan to close the affordability gap and ease housing costs. The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing and incentivizing areas to reform zoning and land use policies to build more lower-cost housing. It also calls for homebuilders to adopt more efficient construction methods.
What a crock of shit. The cost of building housing is not the issue. The economy is dead is the issue. There is not enough cheap energy to keep the complexity of life going as we know it.
How does the current dead economy compare to the one you lived through in the late 70's? The economy was dead, stagflation and inflation were the theme of the day, Carter was pitching America as The King Of Coal because US peak oil had happened in 1970 followed by global peak in 1979, there was no more cheap energy imagined. That decade ended up immediately followed by the go go 80's.
Remember the Charlie Daniels song trying to stop everyone from being depressed, In America?
I agree completely with you about housing and what the markets have done it with, and we certainly deserve a decent correction or outright rearrangement but it just isn't showing up in the numbers in exepcted ways yet. 2008 certainly did, and was another great year to proclaim the economy dead. Same with Covid. And yet it just...won't...die.
Quote from: K-DogThe market destroyed things but the faithful expect a market to fix things. This could rightfully pass as a definition of insanity.
Or just the way the world works nowadays. I fully expect it to break, and am more prepared for it then most, and often in the breaking of a thing there is opportunity. Just as there was during 2008.
I say everyone should stop voting for any politician above the age of 45 and hand off the leadership baton to the younger generation. Older farts won't like it, but I'm betting those more subjected to a future based on the present have more of an interest in their generational opportunity than what all the old farts want in their twilight years.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jan 27, 2024, 04:52 PM
Yes, I grasp the system and why it developed and who wants to perpetuate it. My recent blog on housing detailed how it works. What I find hard to understand is why not a single politician of any age will stand up and propose what is a common fucking sense response to a problem that is so huge and out of control it's in everybody's face at this point.
We have plenty of wicked problems that have no solution. The current housing crisis is not one of them.
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jan 27, 2024, 06:20 PM
QuoteThe problem has been growing for a long time due to how housing has been viewed in our society, not as a fundamental need that all people have but rather as an economic investment used for profit and as a store of wealth.
As a store of wealth it was fine. But stores of wealth are stable. Any commodity that is appreciating or depreciating is not a store of wealth. Regulation of housing to maintain it as a store of wealth vanished when housing was financialized.
If you don't think it should be a store of wealth than we disagree that owning a house or two is the ultimate expression of personal or private property. Property that a worker can translate legitimate earnings (earned by selling personal time) from labor into. That is different from common or public property. Capitalists think all property is private. What else do you think owning the means of production means. Capitalists make no distinction between private and public property. To them all things can be private with enough money. The end result or limiting case of their line of thinking is a return to slavery and 100% exploitation. This happens when rich capitalists have everything.
You know you are talking to a dumfuck when they start talking about privatizing things. And when Bezos buys the Luxor in Las Vegas we will be at 100% exploitation. To him it will be Fair-Oh.
Socialists are not against the elimination of personal property. That is madness. Translating earned labor into personal wealth is a human right. To do other is to endorse slavery. There needs to be a way to store personal property, and stable housing can provide a means for a person to save the fruits of their labor.
Which can still happen in a mythical soft collapse.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jan 27, 2024, 07:06 PM
QuoteRemember the Charlie Daniels song trying to stop everyone from being depressed, In America?
Not the one you mean. But I like this one.
Do you mean this one?
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jan 27, 2024, 07:31 PM
I think we agree that there needs to be housing people can afford if they earn whatever the min wage is for their locale. Now, let's do a thought experiment starting from this premise.
We'll set the min wage at $15/hr for $30K/year. Using the federal guideline of <30% as affordable, we'll make the annual mortgage payments right at 30% for 9000/yr, or $750/mo. We'll now do this as private property so they can store the money in the house resale value. So the mortgage monthly payment is $750. We'll set a fixed rate of interest at 5% (historically very cheap) and make the term 20 years as it was before around 1970. Prewar, mortgages were even shorter, 15 years was common. Using an online mortgage calculator, the house would sell for around $125K.
Now, you buy this house in Podunk and you have a job in the local paper plant and work for 20 years and pay it off. You want to sell it to someone else for $125K. But then the plant closes and the town loses population, and lots of the workers with these houses want to sell them. Except with no work around, they are lucky if they can sell for $50K.
You see how making housing a commodity and trying to use it to store wealth are at odds, even with very fair banking practices. The commodity is subject to supply and demand pressures, and you can't count on what the value will be at the end of the mortgage term. You could also be lucky and the neighborhood will get a high paying Battery plant in town, and your house might sell for double what you paid.
Of course, you can pretty much forget buying a McHovel anywhere these days for $125K, even a total slum.
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: TDoS on Jan 28, 2024, 02:29 PM
Title: I bought a foldable tiny house on Amazon for $26,000 – it’s so easy to build but doe
Post by: RE on Feb 05, 2024, 08:18 AM
I put up an article a while back about a foldable tiny house that sells for $85K with lots of bells & whistles. Here is another one from Amazon more stripped to the basics for $26K!!!! With cities spending $80/day for hotel rooms for homeless people, they could buy one of these in less than 1 year!
This does not have to do with unusual punishment because homelessness is not a crime. There is no punishment for being homeless. The court should rule that there is no crime, but they could decide that restricting access to public land by local government is legal and that fines are not unusual punishment. A persons' housing status being irrelevant. And being homeless is just the shits.
The court pays their maids well enough that their maids don't sleep under bridges. Might be some sympathy there, but the US Supreme court's primary purpose is to defend inequality so I give it a 50 / 50. That is not a misprint.
Title: Opinion: We can’t build our way out of this “housing crisis” without dramatically re
Post by: RE on Mar 22, 2024, 07:53 PM
Here's some great Propaganda from the Real Estate industry to convince Amerikans from the Boomer And Gen X generations who already got their piece of the Property Ownership pie that building Affordable Housing will RUIN THEIR QUALITY OF LIFE! Yes folks, you heard that right, trying to do something proactive to reduce the swelling population of homeless people living in tents will MAKE THINGS WORSE!
More people will move to their state, lift lines at the ski slope will get longer and their PROPERTY VALUES WILL GO DOWN1 Oh, the horror!
Not only do they want to close the FSoA border to immigrants from overseas, they wanna close the border to Colorado to keep people from the East Coast from moving there too! Their water supply will be stressed out and they won't be able to water the lawn or maintain their golf courses either. Unthinkable! The new people who move in might be terrorists, or even worse, Democrats. lol.
Now, granted it's true there is about no place left you can keep increasing the population and not stress out the water supply, but if people are going to keep migratintg here and you want maids and landscapers and barristas and home health care aids to wipe your butt in another couple of years if you don't need one already, if you don't build some places to live they can afford, they'll be pitching tents on your golf course anyhow.
How can people be this stupid? It boggles the mind.
Opinion: We can't build our way out of this "housing crisis" without dramatically reducing quality of life
RE
Title: Micro-apartments are back after nearly a century, as need for affordable housing soa
Post by: RE on Mar 23, 2024, 12:48 PM
SROs are BACK!
Back in the 1970s in NYC, Single Room Occupancy apartments were the definition of Urban Blight, and they were basically all gotten rid of due to endless health code violations, insect and rodent infestation, needles in the hallways, and of course as hubs for prostitutes. Basically, an entrepreneurial Pimp rents an apartment and has a half a dozen flat backers working for him, clocking in a few times a day for a 1 hour slam-bam-thank you m'am liason. In the 70s, a streetwalker whore cost $20/ fuck, you could get a blow job for $10. Depending how generous the Pimp was, he would take somewhere between 10-90% of the retail price and pay the rent and have 1 of the girls bring the sheets to the laundry once a month, if they needed it. lol. So average $5/hour used 10 hours a day, the room brought in around $1500/month. In those days, you could rent such a place for $100/mo or even less. This was of course entry-level pimping and whoring, these were not the guys driving Lincolns and Cadillacs and the hos didn't look like Julia Roberts.
Fast forward to 2024, and it should be no surprise that bringing back these hell holes and re-branding them as "Micro-apartments" is being touted as the "market solution" to the affordable housing problem. It's really the same concept as the Tiny Home, just putting 100s of them into 1 by providing the absolute minimum amount of space necessary to fit a bed and a toilet/sink to wash up and excrete.
Now, what exactly is the minimum space necessary? Well, the WHO has guidelines on this stuff which is supposed to be followed with Prisons, and it's generally considered to be 18 meters2, or around 250 sq ft. This takes into account respiratory issues, sanitation, psychological factors, etc. Do prisons adhere to this standard? With the exception of Federal Penitentiary Country Club prisons for white collar criminals in the FSoA, I doubt any country follows these guidelines for prisons. Any cell that big is going to be shared by 2 people.
So, essentially what we are saying to people is hey, if you get a job and obey all the laws and pay your taxes, you can pay for your own Prison Cell to live in! Which if it was in a nice, safe, well-kept building might be better than prison, but the slumlords who own and rent such places out aren't known for making sure the elevator works, the building access door lock works, all the hall lights work, etc. As you might expect, besides the prostitutes, even you regular renters have a rapid turnover rate, they're in town for a seasonal job or just moved from another state to start a new career or of course, just got let out of prison. Or for old folks and cripples like me, been informed by Medicare after 100 days in a SNIF to recover from some illness or operation they won't pay anymore and you gotta leave IMMEDIATELY. Fortunately for me, I have so far been deemed sufficiently crippled by Medicare to warrant approval for Long Term Care and not told to GET OUT YESTERDAY yet, which has happened to me on 2 prior occassions, neither of which worked out too well. In one case I was sent back home to the apt I had continued paying rent on, but without sufficient home health care assistance to take care of myself yet, Ii got worse againg quickly and then lost my leg. The 2nd time, I gave up the apt because I was hospitalized too long, and they pitched me into an Assisted Care Home which as long time readers know was Dante's 7th Circle of Hell.
In my current SNIF, my room size just about makes the WHO guidelines, but in this type of facility besides your own room, there are 1000s of sq ft of common areas to roll around, and outside garden areas in front and back to sit outside in the good weather. In most SROs, there are no common areas, just a long narrow hallway with doors to each cell on either side, and a stairwell at both ends and elevator in the middle. The apartments usually do not have a porch or patio to sit outside and relieve the claustrophobia, and due to fire laws if you have one you're not allowed to smoke or BBQ on them. There's no relief from the constant state of claustrophobic, and they are too small to have friends over, except perhaps 1 friend to have sex with on your twin bed mattress. Actually sleeping together ends with one of you on the floor sometime during the night.
If you do have 200 sq ft and it's got windows and you set it up right with a murphy bed or loft bed with a desk under it, you can make such a place somewhat liveable, but if this is what you are gonna be stuck with living for the rest of your life, it can become pretty depressing even so. A modern society that can't at least provide a 500 sq ft 1 bedroom apartment for young single workers and old retired ones is not living up to the myth that living in a 1st world industrialized nation is a better life than rural poverty. Shacks in the Favelas in Rio are bigger than 250 sq feet.
For the recent migrants however who currently are either out on the street, on church floors or in army tents or warehouses with 200 beds laid out on a 10'x10' grid, getting your own SRO with heat and running water is of course a big improvement as a temporary living arragent for a few months-year while you find a job and become assimilated into the rat race. The thing is, these places aren't going to be temporary for many, they'll be there for years. In a couple of years they'll be drinking heavily and using drugs. The lights in the hallways won't be replaced and the eevator won't work half the time. Same as it was in the 1970s.
Micro-apartments are back after nearly a century, as need for affordable housing soars
RE
Title: America is full of abandoned malls. What if we turned them into housing?
Post by: RE on Apr 10, 2024, 07:55 AM
As usual, a combination of Goobermint zoning laws and the desire of RE developers toprop up the cost of housing is the major stumbling block in converting unoccupied commercial buildings into affordable housing. Much more than office buildings which don't have plumbing to support separate bathrooms for all the office spaces converted to apartments, strip malls have plumbing that puts bathrooms in each storefront that could be adapted to make residential bathrooms and kitchens. There are 1000s of square feet of empty mall space in just about every city inn the FSoA with the transition to online shopping.
This would also put housing for workers in commercial districts, making fr shorter commutes and more "walkable neighborhoods. Will such conversions start to happen? Not if captalists and hedge funds with a large portfolio of residential housing have anything to say about it, and they do.
America is full of abandoned malls. What if we turned them into housing?
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Apr 10, 2024, 08:53 AM
Which strip malls where? Seattle and areas nearby areas actively convert old strip malls into housing. Malls are ripped down and high end apartments go up where they were. Strip malls may not have been built on the best land, but they all are connected to infrastructure and flipping them into apartments is very profitable.
Then end result is more crowding and the malls had been originally placed where they were for a reason. Now you have neighborhoods miles away from grocery stores with apartments built where the neighborhood used to buy groceries.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Apr 10, 2024, 11:24 AM
I haven't been down in the lower 48 in quite a while, but last time I was in Springfield there were several abandoned strip malls around town. Right near where my mom lived there was an abandoned food superstore that could have easily been converted to a dozen or more apartments of 1 or 2 bedrooms. It was right across the street from another food superstore, which was why it went out of biz. Kroger vs Safeway, and Kroger won.
Here in Anchorage we have the Northfield Mall which has been abandoned for a decade, while at the same time every year the city struggles to find shelters for the homeless. The rental market is so tight I have been on 2 waiting lists for affordable housing for over a year.
I don't know what the reason is the Seattle market is different, perhaps there it's because they are able to completely raze the mall and put up profitable market rate housing instead of affordable housing units. There's enough rich people around they're not only short of affordable housing, they're short of land to build more new Condos for the young IT programmers or boomers selling their McMansions to the Chinese to downsize as they retire.
RE
Title: Tired: Office conversions to residential. Wired: Turning dead malls and suburban
Post by: RE on Apr 13, 2024, 12:51 PM
(https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GettyImages-157193795-e1712958306579.jpg?w=1440&q=75) More grist for the mill about turning strip malls into housing.
Even though it's getting a decent amount of press coverage, I don't expect to see this move along very quickly or get much more than a smattering of conversions done. This only partially due to the zoning regulation problems.
The thing about strip malls is they take a different type of Real Estate developer than the ones who do residential construction, and have a different type of RE management. They are usually owned by small, local capitalists who acquire a piece of land zoned commercial, but too small to be built on by a big corporation that puts up the large malls with Anchor stores, big box places like Best But or Target, etc.
These smaller owners aren't experienced with or don't want the headaches involved with low income housing rental, and all the attending Goobermint regulation involved around finding qualified renters and meeting guidelines. So they would have to find a buyer for those properties who did want to take on such a burden,for what is likely a very low profit but fairly capital intensive business for a small time capitalist.
The only way it might work is if Da Goobermint took over the properties directly and managed it with some kind of public housing agency, but except for really big cities like NYC, most municipalities with these kind of strip malls empty and available don't have such an agency. Nor given the fact most such small munis are strapped for cash and personnel these days is it likely they will be voted into existence any time soon.
So in the meantime, these places will stay mostly vacant and will just rot, while homeless people set up tents in their overgrown parking lots that haven't been repaved in a decade. Gotta love Capitalism. Small or big, it always manages to not solve any problems that really need solutions.
Tired: Office conversions to residential. Wired: Turning dead malls and suburban shopping strips into apartments
RE
Title: German housing crisis: 'Like winning the lottery!
Post by: RE on Apr 16, 2024, 07:09 PM
I've mentioned before that the problem with Affordable Housing isn't strictly an Amerikan one, similar situations exist in the UK, Oz and Canada as well, all the former Brit colonies. It shouldn't be too surprising to hear that Germany also has the problem, despite theoretically being more "socialist" in Europe. In fact, the same banking system is used everywhere, and there is not that much difference in how developers are financed and home buyers get mortgages. It's all the "Persoonal Property" model throughout Western Europe.
I suspect the housing situation is not that much better in Eastern Europe in the countries that were part of the old Soviet Union, but for different reasons. In Moscow for instance, the population has been undergoing die off since the fall of the Soviet Union, which should leave apartments emptied by dead people. However, I also doubt much new construction has taken place over the last 40 years either, as the State used to build housing and issue it out, but I doubt they do it that way now. Nor do I think there are many private contractors. So they probably are living in buildings dating back to WWII and earlier.
German housing crisis: 'Like winning the lottery!'
RE
Title: Affordable Housing Tenants in Greenpoint Describe Squalid Conditions in Luxury Build
Post by: RE on Apr 23, 2024, 07:11 PM
This article demonstrates the numero uno problem with so-called "affordable housing" complexes that are managed by private RE development companies.
They might put up a building using similar architectural plans to one being rented out at market rates, but they don't provide the same level of maintenance and upkeep on the property, and they skimp on or close off entirely common areas in such buildings that make living in a relatively small and cramped unit more bearable.
Although not exactly the same thing, my current living situation which has me in about a 200 sq ft room would be incredibly claustrophobic if that was where I had to spend the whole day, but right outside the door is a common area I share with 16 other gomers & cripples that is about 1000 sq ft. Out past that is an even bigger commons for all 6 of the 17 room wards, then upstairs is a dining room probably 3000 sq ft. Then outside we have a garden and smoking area as well. So even in winter I can leave my room and roll around the building.
I have applied for 3 affordable housing agencies, Alaska Housing run by the state, Cook Inlet Housing run by a Native non-profit corp, and Neighbor Works, a private RE developer and mgmt company which has about a dozen properties. In order to qualify for the tax credits, all the buildings are supposed to have some units reserved for low income. In practice, the company only offers one building, a renovated SRO Hotel in downtown Anchorage with studios the size of my room here in the Gulag. There are no common areas, all the rooms are off a long narrow hallway with emergency stairwells at either end and an elevator in the middle. It's the only building I have been offered an apartment in after more than a year on the waiting lists. Obviously, I turned it down.
By contrast, the units offered by both Alaska Housing and Cook Inlet have extensive common areas and the 1 bedroom units around 550-650 sq ft in size with a full kitchen, not kitchenette. The one across the street has a pool table, a full library room with computers, an exercise room and a communal kitchen and party room if you have a big gathering.
Private for profit capitalists will always skimp out on anything not legally required to get their tax abatement, and they always have less scheduled maintenance with cheaper contractors. Even if the building looked nice when they cut the ribbon, in 2-3 years it's a mess.
Tax abatements to cut the building costs and pad the profits on affordable housing are not enough to insure that for-profit RE mgmt companies provide reasonable and well maintained common areas for low income residents. Just as there need to be minimum size standards for each unit, there needs to be a minimum size for common areas depending on how many units and residents the building is designed for. Maintenance contracts need to be reviewed and approved each year before the company receives its tax credits. Contractors need to keep logs of their work and hours on site, also reviewed by the housing authority, not the mgmt company alone. Contractors who regularly fail to maintain thr properties in good condition need to be decertified and fined.
Low income affordable housing doesn't need to be palatial with huge panoramic views and doormen, but it should be clean and comfortable to live in and not claustrophobic. Closet size units with no more living space than a prison cell is not a viable solution to the housing crisis.
Affordable Housing Tenants in Greenpoint Describe Squalid Conditions in Luxury Building Complex
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Apr 24, 2024, 12:14 AM
QuoteTax abatements to cut the building costs and pad the profits on affordable housing are not enough to insure that for-profit RE mgmt companies provide reasonable and well maintained common areas for low income residents.
If tax abatements are needed to make a project viable, it takes no genius to know that every trick to increase profit will be used.
But if you think the most holy and sanctified 'market; is the medium which people are pre-ordained to interact with the universe. Then I suppose tax abatements are all you can come up with.
All you can do is sing a happy song and remember dreams are free. But rent most people will pay until the day they die. Average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New York City was around $3,000 to $5,000 per month recently.
NYC rentier pets cost a lot to maintain. Or I am wrong, and the 2008 bail out packages have finally lowered the value of the dollar It was bound to happen. Subsidizing the rich will do that.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Apr 24, 2024, 11:12 PM
Quote from: K-Dog on Apr 24, 2024, 12:14 AMIf tax abatements are needed to make a project viable, it takes no genius to know that every trick to increase profit will be used.
They aren't needed to make them viable, it's to make the profit margin higher.
If you have a parcel of land to build on, if you build luxury housing you can get a big margin between the cost of the materials and what rich people will pay. Big profits.
If you put up affordable housing, the difference between the material cost and what people can afford to pay is much smaller. It's still profitable, just not AS profitable. So without any legal obligation to build affordable housing, developers ALWAYS choose to build luxury housing. Thus you have too many McMansions priced at $500K, and too few 3 bedroom townhomes priced at $200K.
The tax credits shrink the difference in the profit margin, but they don't obligate the management company to keep the maintenance up to snuff, at least until it's so bad you have to call in the health dept. So this problem needs to be addressed in the affordable housing laws.
Also quite obviously in every city (and country) now, it's a systemic problem that because luxury housing is more profitable, that's what gets built even if what the neighborhood needs is more affordable housing. This could easily be resolved with zoning laws that required a sufficient acreage be dedicated to affordable housing, the problem being of course NIMBY; luxury home owners don't want affordable housing in their neighborhood because it will lower their property values. You can't put it in poor neighborhoods, because the density there is already at or past the maximum for affordable housing.
Housing definitely needs to be planned and built on a socialist model, not as for-profit private property. It would be a very EZ AI application to figure out how many of each type of housing a given community needs based on the population demographics, average incomes and family sizes. It could then map it out based on the age of the current dwellings and average property sizes and begin to raze older homes on large properties and replace them with affordable housing at greater density. Homeowners would be compensated through eminent domain laws and offered one of the new units in addition to financial compensation. Of course, all the Boomers in big McMansions on 2 acres and the RE salesmen and developers would stand in front of their McMansions with AK-47s and signs saying "You'll have to pry my McMansion from under my cold dead toes" when the bulldozers showed up, but you can't makean omelet without breaking a few eggs. :)
RE
Title: ‘Everything’s just … on hold’: the Netherlands’ next-level housing crisis
Post by: RE on May 06, 2024, 02:32 AM
You can file this under "Misery Loves Company" or, "No matter how bad things are where you live, they're worse somewhere else."
I am a little surprised that the affordable housing problem which basically stems from capitalism run amok in the RE market appear to actually be WORSE in European countries than in the FSoA. Traditionally, European countries ran a more socialist system than the FSoA, but at least in the Netherlands the right wing has been in control for the last 20 years and thoroughly made a mess of the housing market.
Of all the problems faced by our society, this one to me seems so straightforward and requires no new technology to fix. All it requires is planning and financing and creating a WPA style building agency to put up the buildings. Unfortunately of course the whole banking system is so vested in the property market as a source of assets and loans any change which would make housing cheaper and more easily available is resisted by everyone involved in the business, from the builders and developers to the bankers issuing the mortgages.
Each year it gets worse, and each year people complain and nothing changes. It's amazing stupidity.
'Everything's just ... on hold': the Netherlands' next-level housing crisis
RE
Title: How Affordable Housing Distracts People From Housing Affordability
Post by: RE on May 28, 2024, 12:28 PM
One of the few articles that really addresses the real underlying nature of the affordable housing problem, beyond the fact it's not as profitable to build housing for poor people as it is for rich people. It's the nature of the financial model which was put into place after WWII and made housing a financial asset which could be financed by making large debt financing purchases possible for J6P.
Where he goes wrong is after identifying the actual problems, he says this system is immutable, basically handed down by God and can't be changed.
"The term "housing trap" is a way to explain the financialized craziness that makes housing prices more responsive to macroeconomic capital flows than local supply and demand dynamics. The reason housing prices are crazy everywhere at the same time isn't because every local market has the same supply constraints. Supply constraints exist in many markets, sure, but the story of housing affordability is primarily a financial one.
We financialized the housing market for expedient, even righteous, reasons. The consequence of this approach is that today's housing acts more like a financial product than a shelter for a family.
Local governments won't change our country's macroeconomic environment. No city can decouple bank reserves from mortgage-backed securities. No mayor will outlaw the thirty-year mortgage. There won't be a protest movement forcing public employee pension funds to divest from the housing market. For most housing products purchased by most people, we have to deal with the system we've been given.
WHY do we HAVE to accept this stupidity? All that has to be done is give the HUD the authority to open competitive bidding to contractors for the price target housing you want in a neighborhood. Da Goobermint can get all the materials for building the units cheaper than individual contractors can because they can contract directly with the large corporations like Weyerhauser or Dupont that produce the materials and cut out the middlemen. Then, instead of selling the units at whatever the market will bear, make the price 33% of the average monthly income for a min wage worker in that neighborhood. Maintain Price Controls on buying and selling units, and require the owner to live in the unit, not use it as a rental property. Poof, problem solved.
The solutions he suggests like turning rooms in your McMansion into rental apartments andd building Tiny Homes in the backyard will do almost nothing, despite what afficionados like to say, most people don't want to line in a shipping container, and you can't cut up the inside of the typical McMansion and maintain the kind of privacy people buy those things for to begin with.
Housing can't be both a financial product to be securitized and traded and also a place J6P can afford to live. Why won't it happen? Because Baby Boomers who own paid off McMansions would see the value of the property drop like a stone, and people who have a mortgage would go so far underwater they would drown. TBTF Banks holding 30 year mmortgages would all go belly up as the securities that form their Tier 1 Capital structure dropped to 20 cents on the dollar. It won't happen because all the people who have benefited from this system would lose most of their wealth an because our financial system is built on it. It will take a full on crash of the RE market for it to change. Keep your fingers crossed.
How Affordable Housing Distracts People From Housing Affordability
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on May 28, 2024, 07:56 PM
I have never cared about how much the house is worth. To me it was always about paying it off and having no rent. Sell it for a fortune? So what, a new place costs a fortune and you have to live somewhere. And now houses are worth so much property tax is like new rent.
A system that reduced housing values should have a way for people to refinance homes as they lose value for those who have an underwater mortgage. Construction of the system should however not reward those who must refinance to a lower value. Only ease the pain of the stupid who bought air. Socialize their loss somewhat.
But this is random speculation. We live in America. Easing of pain is not what we do.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on May 29, 2024, 12:55 AM
Quote from: K-Dog on May 28, 2024, 07:56 PMI have never cared about how much the house is worth. To me it was always about paying it off and having no rent. Sell it for a fortune? So what, a new place costs a fortune and you have to live somewhere. And now houses are worth so much property tax is like new rent.
A system that reduced housing values should have a way for people to refinance homes as they lose value for those who have an underwater mortgage. Construction of the system should however not reward those who must refinance to a lower value. Only ease the pain of the stupid who bought air. Socialize their loss somewhat.
But this is random speculation. We live in America. Easing of pain is not what we do.
"Legacy" properties like yours pose another problem, because they are out of the system once the mortgage is paid off. There no longer is a bank whose Tier 1 capital structure is affected, no pension fund holds securities of which it is a part. The only effects are on the price it could be sold at if it were to be sold in the new controlled market and how it would be assessed for taxation purposes. You also do not have a home equity line of credit attached and aren't using it as collateral upon which to leverage other loans or purchases.
The problem is here that it's uncertain who would buy this type of house with many bedrooms and large square footage and property if there are available homes that are much cheaper and more energy efficient that better fill the needs of the new population of DINKs (double income no kids). I suspect the number of people who would buy such homes is quite small now, so they would either need to be razed or cut up into multifamily dwellings if the architecture is suitable for that. That's what they did in old cities like St. Louis and Detroit to the Mansions built in the late 1800s when these cities were booming in the years after WWII. I had a friend who lived in one. The 1st floor was cut up into 3 apartments, 2nd floor 2 and the basement and attic each had 1. They were all 1 or 2 bedroom apts. Floor plan was crazy nuts. This was the only way the people who owned these places could afford the taxes assessed on them as the cities lost their populations of wealthy people that could afford big homes.
As long as you could afford the new tax assessment under the new property financing structure, you wouldn't need to make any changes and any financial loss is just on paper, it's not realized until you sell the property or die. If the new taxation is too high, you would either have to divide up the place to rent some units or sell it to Da Goobermint at a fixed rate to be replaced by housing under the new code in terms of square footage and energy efficiency.
I wouldn't worry about it because it's not gonna happen. Your situation is not uncommon amongst old Boomers, but it takes a back seat to the much larger problem of all the homes owned by GenX and later that also often have 2nd & 3rd mortgages and consolidation loans that reduced their credit card debt & auto or student loan debt. That's where resolving the financial mess would be a real nightmare. Jamie Dimon and the rest of the Masters of the Universe will never let this happen.
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on May 29, 2024, 12:23 PM
QuoteThe problem is here that it's uncertain who would buy this type of house with many bedrooms
Four bedrooms and 2700 square feet is not a palace. Plenty of people would want this house. It is nice but a lot of people would not think it is 'too much'. Homes in Seattle are being built three stories high and five feet from the property line on all sides. I see big and ugly everywhere. What we have is nice.
Right now if the house was on the market it could sell in a day. I picked the location to be close to Seattle and the I-90 I-405 freeway interchange. I did that on purpose and looked at homes in the area so I could take any job south to Tacoma and north to Everett. Commutes are not as easy as they used to be, so that area is now reduced, but the location remains good.
Better insulation in the attic would be good. The new heat pump is working great. I think the furnace only burned for two days this winter.
One of those bedrooms is the headquarters of the Doomstead Diner. Four bedrooms is not too many.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on May 29, 2024, 12:51 PM
It all depends on the taxation structure and the price of new housing that substitutes for it. It's not going to happen so don't worry about it.
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: TDoS on May 29, 2024, 03:43 PM
True about the house. Is the garage part of the 2700 ft^2? Probably not. But as with most things, perspective matters. To you? No big deal, 2700 ft^2, a couple of Benz to tool around in and be comfortable.
I imagine someone who grew up in a place like this might have a different perspective. Hell, a garage with a pair of Benz's in it? Get rid of the Benz, get some cots and a porta potty, a hotplate, and you've got heaven!
PS: This isn't the one I was raised in. All the aluminum siding was still on ours when mom sold it to the next folks down the holler. And ours had a creek out back we got water from in the winter when the pipes froze in the trailer.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on May 29, 2024, 04:40 PM
Quote from: TDoS on May 29, 2024, 03:43 PMPS: This isn't the one I was raised in. All the aluminum siding was still on ours when mom sold it to the next folks down the holler. And ours had a creek out back we got water from in the winter when the pipes froze in the trailer.
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: TDoS on May 30, 2024, 03:53 PM
Quote from: TDoS on May 29, 2024, 03:43 PMPS: This isn't the one I was raised in. All the aluminum siding was still on ours when mom sold it to the next folks down the holler. And ours had a creek out back we got water from in the winter when the pipes froze in the trailer.
RE
That kid had a banjo. One of the kids up the holler had a fiddle? Was pretty good too. And dueling banjos is a great duet.
Title: San Diego residents oppose mayor Gloria's 1,000-bed homeless shelter proposal
Post by: RE on Jun 09, 2024, 01:36 AM
A 1000 bed shelter? If this is on the design of the typical "open plan" low barrier access shelters they put in school gymnasiums and warehouses, they lay out the floor with a 10'x10' checker board, 100 sq ft with a bed, dresser table with a couple of locking drawers, a chair and writing desk. 100 sq ft per customer. That's 100,000 square feet just for the living space, then it needs bathrooms, food prep and storage, administrative offices, a waiting room etc etc etc. This is basically a small town. Except you have he whole town in a building with a footprint of a bit over 2 football fields. Clearly it would need to be multistory, since I don't think they are gonna build a stadium.
Except of course unlike a small town, they mostly don't know each other, many have been on the street for years, many don't speak english, etc, etc etc. You're going to house 1000 people together like this for an indefinite amount of time?
How many guards does a prison have on duty per capita? 10 seems to be average for minimum security prisons. But prisons have cells to lock up the prisoners and they're generally not all free to move around at the same time. The potential here for a fight to break out and turn into a full scale riot is pretty significant. So besides being multistory, each floor would need to be cut up into a few large rooms. If we make it 6 stories with 4 rooms on a floor, bottom floor for the lobby and offices and some kind of recreation areas, that's 20 rooms, so 50 people per room. This seems somewhat manageable.
How many staff will you have on duty for 3 8 hour shifts per room? shifts 8-4, 4-12 and graveyard 12-8. In the Gulag here for 17 gomers per court, we have 3 CNAs for the day, 2 at night. Let's say you could do it with 2 for the day shifts, 1 for the graveyard, that's 100 5 day/week full time, and another 100 2 days/week part time. What's the pay scale for this job? At least $25/hr to start, IMHO. For just the full time workers, that's $50K/year each, $10M year for this bare bones of operating staff. You're gonna need more building security, housekeeping and janitorial and of course a few highly paid administrators. Social Workers also.
In other words, the costs incurred with this type of group housing end up far higher than if you give them individual apartments. If 100 homeless set up a tent city, there are no official staff costs for this. They usually will self-police to an extent and assign cleanup duty if the encampment lasts. However, the sanitation department has to come in periodically, police get called often for domestic issues and they eventually contract for porta potties. The more it becomes state sponsored, the more it begins to cost. Here's CA costs per inmate:
Costs for running Homeless Housing system to address the problems basically the same way a Prison or Nursing Home is run would be similar. Not precisely the same, there would be different things required, like finding permanent housing, jobs and education for the kids. The numbers we are talking about are already bigger than the Prison Population of the FSoA, the biggest Police State in the world. There are roughly 1.23M prisoners in the FSoA. Nearly 2.6M people migrated to the FSoA in 2022. Estimated homeless in 2022 was 582,000. Based on observation around Anchorage, newz stories about homelessness and anecdotal stories, I estimate the number conservatively has tripled since 2022. It also doesn't cunt couch surfers and people in other substandard situations like illegal apartments and shared apartments by immigrants where they sleep in shifts.
So, IOW, the idea wwe are going to be able to handle the growing homeless problem by increasing the size and scope of the public homeless shelter system is another example of Magical Thinking. Taxpayers won't cough up thee money it would take, and billionaires and corporations won't foot th bill either. They'll make a show, but the actual numbers will dwarf what is actually available in the system. Wait lists for housing will stretch into years. It's a time bomb waiting to explode.
San Diego residents oppose mayor Gloria's 1,000-bed homeless shelter proposal
RE
Title: Chicago’s homeless population increased threefold, a city snapshot shows, owing larg
Post by: RE on Jun 09, 2024, 10:39 AM
In my post last night, I made the following Educated Guess (EG as opposed to WAG)
" Estimated homeless in 2022 was 582,000. Based on observation around Anchorage, newz stories about homelessness and anecdotal stories, I estimate the number conservatively has tripled since 2022."
Today's newz from Chicago supports this latest estimate.
Much like FSoA debt, the rapid increase over such a short interval of time is an indicator that "critical mass" has been passed, the point at which normal incremental expansion of existing systems can't keep pace with forces that are driving the increase in numbers that the fixes are supposed to address. It's the "Hockey Stick Moment", a phrase I am now coining and claiming as my own contribution to the Collapse Lexicon. 8) For the debt bomb, the Hockey stick graph looks like this right now.
The Hockey Stick Moment for Homo Sap based on the graph came right around Party Time on 12/31/1999. The numbers had turned Due North and nothing short of a crash will fix the problem.
It's harder to get a single graph to cover the whole FSoA homeless situation, you can only get snapshots from different organizations that run shelters in different locations. DHS has a pretty big system.
Here's fire's related to homeless encampments in SF
(https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/2OmFX/full.png)
The lack of uniform statistics to track homelessness makes this a particularly hard problem to judge. What few stats there are are also limited to just the Big Shities. I'd be really interested to know what the stats are for small to medium size cities like Springfield MO. This would give you a better view of what the local homegrown population of homeless is like without the constant input of new migrants.
If this trend continues more than a couple of years, cities like NY, SF, LA and Chicago will look like a floor display of tents at Bass Pro. The size and number of Bidenvilles popping up in downtowns, under overpasses and in public parks already puts the problem in full view of anyone still fortunate enough to be cruising to the mall to do some shopping or heading to a restaurant for dinner out. Another doubling in a couple of years would inevitably lead to either anarchy or large scale concentration camps and deportations.
This of course is exactly the kind of scenario tailor made for for Trump MAGAotts.
Chicago's homeless population increased threefold, a city snapshot shows, owing largely to migrants
RE
Title: Top 25 Homeless Cities
Post by: RE on Jun 10, 2024, 12:56 AM
I'll paste in the Top 10, since both K-Dog's and my Hometowns make it. Anchorage comes in #6 and Seattle at #5. $4,3 & 2 are San Jose, NY & LA. #1 in per Capita Homeless: Eugene, OR.
Surprisingly, Chicago does not make the list. Nor does Miami or Houston. I find the stats somewhat questionable because of this.
Full Top 25 Homeless Cities List (https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/25-cities-with-the-highest-homeless-population-per-capita-in-the-us-1311550/?singlepage=1)
10. San Diego, California
Homeless People per 100,000 Residents: 257
San Diego County's homeless population has reached a record high of 10,264, surpassing previous peaks in 2012 and 2017. The unsheltered population increased by 26% to 5,171 individuals. Homelessness among seniors increased by 46%, with 29% of the homeless population aged 55 or older. 80% of homeless individuals surveyed reported becoming homeless within San Diego County. 9. Savannah, Georgia
Homeless People per 100,000 Residents: 259
There are 259 homeless per 100,000 people in Savannah. In 2022, the Continuum of Care partners in Savannah served 4,058 unduplicated homeless individuals, per Homeless Authority. In 2022, the Chatham-Savannah Authority for the Homeless provided emergency shelter (hotel/motel stays) for 1,577 medically fragile homeless individuals. The authority also provided 441 transportation services and purchased 278 bus tickets to help homeless individuals access stable housing with family or friends. 8. San Fransisco, California
Homeless People per 100,000 Residents: 261
According to the 2024 Point-in-Time (PIT) Count, 8,323 people were experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, with 3,969 staying in shelters and the remaining 4,354 unsheltered. Job loss (26%) and evictions (13%) were among the top reasons for homelessness in the city, according to a survey. 62% of the homeless population in the city is male, 34% female, 3% transgender, and 1% gender non-conforming. 7. Las Vegas, Nevada
Homeless People per 100,000 Residents: 273
The 2023 annual estimate suggests that 16,251 people in Southern Nevada will experience homelessness at some point during the year which is a significant increase from the 2022 estimate of 13,972. The Black population is disproportionately represented among the homeless, with 37% of the homeless population identifying as Black, despite making up only 12% of Southern Nevada's overall population. 6. Anchorage, Alaska
Homeless People per 100,000 Residents: 274
There are 274 homeless per 100,000 people in Anchorage. According to Alaskapublic.org, the winter of 2022-2023, Anchorage experienced a record 24 deaths among the homeless population, with 11 fatalities occurring between October 2022 and April 2023. The city spent $161 million on the homeless crisis since 2020. Aceh.org reports that Anchorage has a gap of 221 shelter beds, 52 transitional housing units, and 2,478 permanent housing units (including rapid rehousing, supportive housing, and independent units) to meet the needs of the homeless population. 5. Seattle, Washington
Homeless People per 100,000 Residents: 349
Seattle has one of the highest rates of homelessness per capita in the United States. The Seattle-King County area accounts for roughly half of Washington's homeless population, with around 14,000 people experiencing homelessness in 2023. 4. San Jose, California
Homeless People per 100,000 Residents: 363
San Jose stands fourth among the cities with the highest homeless population per capita in the US. According to the 2022 homeless census report, roughly a third of the homeless population is unable to work, while 41% are looking for jobs and 28% are not seeking employment. Since 2020, the supportive housing system in Santa Clara County has helped 9,645 people move from homelessness to stable housing and has prevented homelessness for thousands of households. 3. New York City, New York
Homeless People per 100,000 Residents: 394
The total number of homeless individuals in New York City shelters reached an all-time high of 63,636 in 2023. In 2019, the city reported that 3,600 individuals experienced unsheltered homelessness, sleeping in public spaces such as streets and public transit rather than shelters. New York City stands third among the US cities with the largest homeless population. 2. Los Angeles, California
Homeless People per 100,000 Residents: 397
There were around 397 homeless per 100,000 people in Los Angeles. As of 2019, California had a deficit of 1.4 million affordable homes relative to demand. Since 2019, Los Angeles County has seen a 68% increase in shelter beds for the homeless, from 15,617 in 2019 to 26,245 in 2023. Since 2020, more than 21,000 individuals have been placed into permanent housing each year in Los Angeles County. 1. Eugene, Oregon
Homeless People per 100,000 Residents: 432
Eugene tops the list for being one of the cities with the highest homeless population per capita in the US with around 432 per 100,000 people being homeless. Around 44% (1,182) of the 2,690 homeless adults aged 25-64 in Eugene were experiencing chronic homelessness in January 2022. In total, 73% of homeless people in the Eugene area live unsheltered which is one of the highest rates in the country. Eugene had the second-highest number of people experiencing homelessness (2,880) among largely urban areas outside of major cities in the United States.
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jun 10, 2024, 12:40 PM
Homelessness being as bad as it is, at least in Seattle people are able to walk into stores and take whatever they want. If corporate decisions were not so glacially slow. The head office would have already closed the store.
If that happened I would have to be here all the time.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jun 10, 2024, 02:02 PM
They figure the Shrinkage into the pricing. Cost of doing retail in a Big Box store.
Walmart has tightened up their shelving and entrance/exit controls quite a bit. Camping items are on locked shelves now along with electronics and gunz. Food is basically free though. Most clothing also. I could easily shop for free anytime. They never check the receipt when a cripple on a EVchair zips through the exit corridor.
RE
Title: DINER ORGANIZATIONAL KICKOFF: MILLION DOOMER MARCH & OCCUPATION
Post by: RE on Jun 12, 2024, 06:32 PM
Speaking of the visibility issue, the Right-to-Shelter cities with the biggest numbers of migrants have just begun to enforce length-of-stay limits for the refugees currently in the system and have begun booting them out.
Obviously if they have to be kicked out, there isn't a permanent dwelling available they can afford. So HTF is this a RTS? Your RTS only lasts for 90 days? The reason they're doing it is just as obvious, they have to make room for new refugees and they can't keep expanding the number they house indefinitely. Besides the ballooning cost is the staffing issue, as I mentioned in a prior post, every one of these shelters requires a healthy size staff to maintain it. Finding people who will do that is as hard or harder than finding home health care workers or CNAs, and they're competing for the same set of low skill, low pay workers.
It's exactly the same situation as what has gone on in hospitals over the last 30 years. Length-of-stay dropped from over a week to 3 days, although COVID bumped it up for a while.
Medicare will only pay for a few days where they determine "acute care" is needed, then you get bumped down to a SNIF if you still need care. After 100 days, they stop paying for that, unless you're a cripple like me who can qualify for long term care. The whole hospital biz outstripped the capacity to train doctors and nurses fast enough years ago. The shortage gets worse every year.
Now, improvements in medical fixes allowed this to occur without the mortality rate increasing, though that is starting to change now as average life span decreased for men in the last couple of years. Discharged patients did have homes to go back to though, so you didn't see them on the street.
Discharging people from shelters with no alternative housing means they go out on the street, where they certainly will be visible and come winter turning blue and showing up in the ER with frozen toes and fingers. The Mayors hope this will get more money from the State & Fed, but this seems unlikely, especially with Trump.
I would expect the ACLU to file a class action suit to stop this, but again I doubt it will be very successful, and it will take a while to get to the SCOTUS.
The Dem Convention is in Chicago. Reps are in Milwaulkee. I fully expect to see Tent Cities of Homeless & Migrants pop up like Mushroom on a damp day in Kennett Square, PA at both locations. New York I think offers a bus ticket to any homeless person who will leave the city.
During the Great Depression, the Bonus Army of WWI Vets marched across the FSoA to set up a huge Hooverville in Washington. It was violently removed by the FSoA Military under the command of Gen. Douglas Macarthur. George Patton was also part of the goon squad.
According to the history books, their numbers were in the 1000s. I think it's possible this could be exceeded by 3 orders of magnitude and numbers could measure in the 1,000,000s. Martin Luther King organized a Million Man March on Washington in the 60s. FSoA population in 1960 was half what it is now.
I hope there is a plan already in the works by advocates for Homeless & Refugees calling for a March and Occupation of both cities. However, I haven't heard of one yet, so I am hereby announcing a Diner Organizational effort and Fundraiser. I suggest we announce this on our main website, start a Go Fund Me page, get a Social Media page etc etc etc. I am willing to donate my copious free time and writing skills to getting this going. We will need many more of our friends from the Doomer Community with expertiese in video, SEO, IT, AI, blah blah blah.
Let's take the lead on this. It's something we can do. We just gotta get the snowball rolling. The snow is on the ground ready to be picked up. I will be adding this post to my blog, and I will record a video tonight for the YouTube channel. More ideas welcome.
Title: Deja Vu Chicago 1968?
Post by: RE on Jun 13, 2024, 05:44 PM
Add the Windy City to the list of "Sanctuary Cities" evicting refugees from homeless shelters to Boston and New York. Since the Dem convention is in Chicago, it's the Perfect Storm for Deja Vu of Chicago in '68.
Ya think they';; bring in as many Nat Guard & Army troops?
Definitely shows the worth of keeping a Bugout Machine as part of your preps. At minimum, everyone should have an old pickup or van with a trailer hitch and a small cargo trailer. Next step up is a Class-C RV. You can put together the basic package on the used market for under $5K. Add a Storage Unit @ $50/mo to keep valuables safe and a cell phone for $20/mo for communications. Min wage job 10hrs/wk and you can live pretty good. Snowbird and drive south for the winter.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jun 26, 2024, 01:04 PM
Welcome Friends to another edition of Wolf Response. I'm your host, Richard Wolf, and I want to talk to you today about what is a genuine housing crisis here in the United States.
Now, on one level, I'm horrified to have to talk to you about this. What really sparked my determination to prepare this for you was the announcement by Treasury Secretary Yellen of a $200 million contribution of the treasury to address the housing crisis. This is the equivalent of confronting an entire state in this country of desperate poverty and announcing with great fanfare that you're going to give $11.14 to help deal with the crisis. People will look at you as if you were crazy, which you would be. I am embarrassed for the United States government. I'm embarrassed for Treasury Secretary Yellen, and let me explain what I mean.
The housing crisis has been brewing in the United States for 30 to 40 years. All kinds of specialists and experts have written reports, many that I read and commented on, documenting this crisis. It's real simple: there are not enough homes for the people of this country who need them. There are especially insufficient homes for young families starting out who don't have a lot of money. The statistics show that the relationship between the average cost of a home and the average income American families are earning has been going in the wrong direction for 35-40 years. In other words, people don't have enough money to afford homeownership, which keeps being presented to people as if it were part of the American dream that they're entitled to if they work hard. Well, it's become more and more unaffordable.
That has forced more and more people to forego owning their own home and rent instead, and so rents have gone crazy. We measure in the United States affordable housing with a simple statistic: housing is affordable, owning or renting, if it doesn't cost you more than 25%, maybe up to 30%, of your income. There are many millions of Americans, many millions, who are spending more than 25% or 30% for their homes, for their housing, and it's been that way.
Now, you will hear conservatives, if you listen to them, explain to you that economics is about supply and demand, and that supply and demand, if allowed to function freely—you know, the free market—will solve all our problems. Wrong. It hasn't solved the housing problem. We've had an imbalance between the demand for housing and the supply of housing that has gotten worse over the last 30 years, not better. The capitalist economy in which we live has not solved that problem, not even come close, and that's a failure. There's no honest way, if you're going to be honest, to get out of that sad reality.
This system, this capitalist system, free enterprises that build housing or not, free banking enterprises that lend people money to buy a house or not, employers who pay you enough to afford housing or not, allowing them all to do their profit-driven, maximizing their benefits as employers ends up with the housing prices we're living with. An honest politician, and we have few of those left, would tell you our system is broken and point to housing as a prime example.
And I haven't even gotten to the extreme failures—the people that are homeless and are more and more in number and visible across this country, the people who aren't homeless but are crowded way too many in too few square feet of housing. No, I could, but I won't. I'm going to talk about the average situation because it's a big, fat capitalist failure, and we ought to be big enough people to say: the most important things in life, food, clothing, shelter, and supporting communities. If housing, shelter is one of them, then on that score alone we ought to be able to say our system doesn't work. That's the reality. That's the real crisis. And as long as we have no honest politicians dealing with it, if all we have is periodic speeches like Secretary Yellen telling us that she's come up with a $200 million—$2 million per state—it's nothing.
I did a little calculation: Elon Musk's assets are $200 billion. Given a 5% return, that's $200 million a week. We don't touch his wealth, we don't touch the income of $200 million. We give that amount—that weekly income of this billionaire is what's available for the entire housing crisis of this country. That's what our Secretary of the Treasury takes us for: idiots, fools. People likely say, "Oh, $200 million is a lot," because they don't understand how piddly it is relative to what is the need. Don't be fooled. This is a system increasingly unable to do what an economic system ought to be able to do simply on the grounds of human decency.
If these kinds of presentations strike you as worthwhile, please go to our website, help us with a small donation if you can, share this video with others who might be interested, and as I often say, I look forward to speaking with you again soon.
Title: What the Supreme Court’s ruling on homeless camps could mean for Anchorage
Post by: RE on Jun 29, 2024, 12:49 PM
The Homeless Crisis has ratcheted up another notch with the recent decision handed down by the SCOTUS overturning a ruling by the Appeals court that allowed Homeless folks to camp outside when no alternative housing is available. Effectively, this criminalizes being homeless.
Here on the Last Great Frontier we are leaders in Homelessness despite a small population and lots of places people can set up tents or park RVs, which they do. It's generally tolerated until the campsite gets too big or there is major violence, aka somebody gets killed. Usually over a drug deal.
In fact, most cities have empty lots that could be made open for camping or buildings that could be squatted on, but they won't designate them as such because if people can live legally without paying rent it undermines the property ownership paradigm and real estate bizness.
The problem of course is that as more people become homeless due to economic circumstances, once the municipality run shelter space fills up, where do they go? In Boston, they've been using Logan airport, but as of July 9th they will be kicked out from there also.
Unless they are arrested, all that "abating" a homeless encampment does is force the folks to move to another spot. Which is just a big pain in the ass game of musical chairs. For the homeless person, unless you still have a car it means really paring down your personal possessions to keep it all packed and ready to move every day.
Dropping down below cars, lots of homeless use shopping carts to keep all their stuff together and ready to roll.
Personally, if I still had both legs and reasonable health, I would go with a bike-trailer combo. There are some nice commercial ones or you can DIY pretty easily.
Actually, I could pull either of these easily with my EV Scooter, so in the event I move back to independent living in an apartment and have room to store it, I think I will build one as my new prep hobby for SHTF Day. I would build one that allows me to also pull my EV Wheelchair with it. Top speed would not be fast, walking speed and hill climbing ability limited with the wheelchair loaded, but I could also motorize the trailer which would make the load up to 500 lb which would be plenty. Advantage is I would have a lot of batt storage capability. I already wired in a 1500W inverter to my EV wheelchair.
Anyhow, I think they cleared the Farbanks St encampment, which is a bummer because I was going to take the bus over there to check it out. Gotta find out where they moved to.
Title: ‘Terrifying and dystopian’: the dark realities of the supreme court’s homelessness d
Post by: RE on Jun 30, 2024, 12:24 PM
I think we could see the forced displacement of unhoused folks into what I would call internment camps out in the middle of nowhere – a mass migration of unhoused people from one place where their existence is banned to other places where the laws don't ban their existence. Many cities already have authorized camps in far-out locations that are completely invisible to the general public.
If/when Trumpolini gets reinstalled as POTUS Dementus, you can count on this being the "Final Solution" to the Homeless problem. Homeless people will simply become "Desapericido", dissapeared from the streets by rounding them up on buses and driven outside of town to an Internment Camp set up next door to the City Dump, for disposal of Human Waste. This way, as the garbage accumulates in the camp they can periodically have the inmates shovel it into wheelbarrows and roll it over to the dump themselves.
The camps will have Army style barracks tents with two rows of a dozen bunk beds, 48 people to a tent. Each meat package will have a container box under the beds and a locker next to the bed on the wall in which to store personal items. Behind each tent there will be 4 Porta-Potties for excretion. There will be a single Shower tent at the end of each double row of bedroom tents with unheated water, and each tent will have a once a week shower schedule. In front of the entrance to each row will be a large Gazebo tent where there are lunch tables and MREs are distributed, delivered daily, along with a water truck and a daily bus arrival in the morning and evening of meat packages. The camp will be enclosed by razor wire with the gates closed at 8PM curfew and opened at 6AM with arrival of the first bus or food/water truck. The camp will be a minimum of 10 miles outside the city limits.
When the camp fills to Max Capacity, Meat Packages there the longest will be bused to the outskirts of the next city and dropped off, where they can then walk into the city to look for a park or street near a strip mall they can shoplift or dumpster dive enough food to survive until they are rounded up again by the city's Human Waste Collection bus and shipped outside town to their camp. Then rinse and repeat until they have been in every city in the FSoA at least once. This should take a few years.
Downtowns will be free of unsightly homeless meat packages begging for food and the homeless population will be evenly redistributed around the whole country. I think 20% of people could be homeless before the folks with homes and jobs would even notice them occassionally walking into town with a backpack or pulling a carryon bag of clothes.
Title: Anchorage assembly adopts five-year strategic homeless plan
Post by: RE on Jul 18, 2024, 06:24 AM
Sounds like they're doing something, right? A 5 Year Plan! Then you read this line:
The first Anchored Home strategic plan was from 2018-2021, and assembly chair said this is a continuation and update of the plan that has been in place for the last four to five years, that focuses on getting off the streets and into housing.
So, IOW, they are going to continue doing exactly what they have been doing for the last 5 years, which hasn't been working! In the words of Albert Einstein:
They estimate there are 3000 homeless, but this year they only had shelter for around 1000. They intend to add 150 beds/yr, so at 5 years they still will have less than 2000 beds. Does anyone think there will be fewer homeless in 5 years?
Does the plan actually address the main CAUSE of the homeless crisis, which is lack of affordable housing? Nope.
At least I still have a roof over my head. Of course in Nov when Trumpovetsky gets installed in the Oval Office, who knows what will happen to medicare? They'll probably ship us to a concentration camp in the Yukon.
Anchorage assembly adopts five-year strategic homeless plan
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 18, 2024, 10:15 PM
Expecting an American Politician to do more than knee-jerk to the homeless problem is wishful thinking. An American politician can't understand that some problems might be the result of systemic system contradiction. It would be heresy to admit to such a thing and it buys no votes.
That said, any solution that forecasts into the future is a MORAL failing unrelated to witch doctor economics, which is the only kind of economics American politicians know. The failing is not one of simple ignorance. There is tacit acceptance.
I doubt your Alaskan Politicians can see themselves in a mirror. They can't reflect.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jul 19, 2024, 01:17 AM
Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 18, 2024, 10:15 PMExpecting an American Politician to do more than knee-jerk to the homeless problem is wishful thinking. An American politician can't understand that some problems might be the result of systemic system contradiction. It would be heresy to admit to such a thing and it buys no votes.
That said, any solution that forecasts into the future is a MORAL failing unrelated to witch doctor economics, which is the only kind of economics American politicians know. The failing is not one of simple ignorance. There is tacit acceptance.
I doubt your Alaskan Politicians can see themselves in a mirror. They can't reflect.
The problem here is there is no provision in the capitalist system for people who cannot or will not work, for whatever reason, so no housing except FREE housing would be affordable. Before food stamps/SNAP cards, people at the very bottom either stole food or starved, or died from some disease from dumpster diving for food. If they stole, they eventually landed in prison.
Food has become so cheap and ubiquitous in Amerika that handing out SNAP cards so people with ZERO income don't starve means they don't disappear through death as quickly. That means they accumulate on the street. They used to Squat in abandoned buildings in slum areas, but to take NYC as an example, the East Village which was a total slum area when I was in HS has all been renovated and gentrified. There still may be some empty buildings in the South Bronx where people squat, but mostly they were demolished and are piles of rubble.
So, you start with the population of people with psychological problems and drug addicts on the street. Then you have a person who loses his job and gets evicted. He's now on the street with these people. It doesn't take long before he also has a drug or alcohol problem, if he didn't have it before that. Then you add recent immigrants with no job and add them. All these street people are basically unemployable, they don't bathe regularly and they have to move around as the cops come and do sweeps to clear encampments.
Just like the society has to hand out Free Food to people with ZERO income, on the humanitarian level it has to provide FREE shelter. It doesn't matter if they don't have a job because they are Schizophrenic or simply lazy, they still need a place to sleep and to shit and shower. The mindset of the capitalist is "What incentive is there for people to work if we give them a free room and free food?" The truth there is that unless the job pays enough to make the person's life significantly better than just a room with a bed, shower & toilet access, there is no incentive. However, I think most people once they have their basic needs taken care of would choose to work at least part time so they could buy a bicycle and a cell phone and aspire to more and further improving their life. If they are happy though just contemplating the meaning of life and playing chess in the park, that's OK too. As a society we do have the resources to put up basic shelter that is free for everyone.
The society is quite comfortable with people who are born Rich not working. Many an Aristocrat born with some Title has gone his whole life never working, and we are fine with that. But if a person born poor wants to go through life not working, they are supposed to die. If you feed them but don't give them somewhere to sleep and stay clean, they end up on the street. So the common sense, obvious answer is simply to build the housing to accommodate that.
Now, the question is, what type of housing and where do you put it? I think the Modular shipping Conex Tiny Home type housing is ideal for most locations. It can be stacked to get good density and use of real estate. It would come bare bones with just a cot to sleep on, a table and chair, a toilet, sink and shower. Well insulated with heat and electricity.
Prices for your own starter module would be as cheap as $5000. You have a safe place for all your personal possesions to stay locked up.
In cities with empty office buildings, they coul be gutted and a lift system installed that would raise the module to any floor and slide it in place. All you need from the building is its steel framework. Imagine simply sliding modules into this structure.
As long as the modules come in a standard size, they can fit any building design you like.
To move your module into a nicer one than the free ones would cost money and be incentive to work to improve your situation. You get to keep what you have accumulated over time though and moving is EZ. You just ship your home on a Pod moving truck.
I guarantee this would be cheaper than the money currently being spent of the homeless problem. The Real Estate biz will never allow it though.
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 19, 2024, 12:29 PM
QuoteThe society is quite comfortable with people who are born Rich not working. Many an Aristocrat born with some Title has gone his whole life never working, and we are fine with that.
I'm not.
In my world even an Einstein would have janitorial duty two days a week. But no more than that considering the other job which has greater value *. Rich people would be those who have retired on a nice pension after working for twenty or more years.
When I think about the social contract I think about it from both ends. I take my socialism seriously. It is not about just getting free stuff. That is adolescent. Many people are into socialism just for free stuff **. Not me. The social contract goes both ways.
We are actually on the same page. Everyone's basic needs should be met. No exceptions.
* The Idle Rich who are lazy and never bothered to learn or develop skills would get low rated jobs because their labor has low social value. Everyone should be employed at full social value. On the other hand. (In a thought experiment revolution.) Many not so idle rich have had time to develop skills and would prosper under socialism. If they adjusted attitudes. For a few this would be easy because they recognize a better world, they are a part of this better world, and their needs are still met. For others adjustment would be impossible because their core identities are built around exploitation. For such living good is not good enough.
** Those in their youth who dabble in socialism only from a desire for free stuff develop warped and distorted understandings of it. Jordan Peterson is an example of this. He is happy to share his ignorance with anyone who will listen.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jul 19, 2024, 01:09 PM
I agree that everybody who is able bodied physically and mentally should have to work at something and that everybody regardless of education or how brilliant they are should have to do some time each week working the shit jobs nobody wants but some people have to do all the time because they aren't qualified for anything else.
However, what do you do with the person who is just plain lazy and doesn't show up for work he doesn't like? What is the punishment for Laziness if a person is guaranteed food to eat and a place to sleep, shit and shower? Do you imprison them? Force them to listen to Rap Music?
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jul 19, 2024, 04:27 PM
Now that I have explained the common sense solution, here's why the RE bizness will never allow it to even start.
As soon as you start offering these FREE Universal Basic Shelter containers, everybody who is in one of the many tiny cramped NY studio or 1 bedroom apts that are no bigger than this (and sometimes smaller) but is paying rent of $3000/month will want one. So it's not just the currently homeless who need shelter that you have to provide for, it's everyone with a low income who wants to start saving money and will take what amounts to a very small drop in standard of living to move into a free container home.
No kid just graduating HS is gonna want to stay at home and live with Mom & Dad when they can have their own little box to play video games and vape. They don't have sex anymore, but in the old days having your own pad was how you finally graduated from 3rd base in the back seat of your car and got laid.
Free shelter, even very basic like this totally undermines the current RE market. All the housing currently used for low income people becomes worthless. I wouldn't move out of my container size free dwelling until I was making big money. It's not worth it if it takes up 1/3rd or more of your monthly income.
The solution to this might be to have a 25% Housing Tax on all incomes. So once you start making $10K/mo, it might be worth it to leave the system, although you still have to pay the tax in addition to your for pay home costs.
Besides this, as soon as you start offering this, the demand would be so great they never could supply the containers and places to drop them fast enough. How do you you decide who gets them first? A lottery?
Anyhow, it's not gonna happen. Free Basic Shelter is pretty much an impossible dream to get rolling, except perhaps after collapse and a significant die off. Then there sshould be plenty of excess housing around.
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 20, 2024, 01:16 PM
QuoteAs soon as you start offering these FREE Universal Basic Shelter containers, everybody who is in one of the many tiny cramped NY studio or 1 bedroom apts that are no bigger than this (and sometimes smaller) but is paying rent of $3000/month will want one. So it's not just the currently homeless who need shelter that you have to provide for, it's everyone with a low income who wants to start saving money and will take what amounts to a very small drop in standard of living to move into a free container home.
There can be no solution then. Not short of a revolution. In Japan the 'market' was able to provide a half-assed solution. But America can't have anything like this.
Markets can't respond to crisis, but Japan has unique circumstances. A capitalist solution was already in place providing a digital office in a country where privacy is limited. That solution somewhat adapted to provide 'housing' to people who can behave themselves better than most Americans can.
Internet Cafe Refugee - Homeless in Japan
And in this one we find what living the good life in a Internet cafe is like.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jul 20, 2024, 07:11 PM
Sadly, this is the case. Because the Property Ownership system is so deeply embedded into our culture, all property of any type will either belong to an individual or belong to the state. So to make Free Housing possible, all housing has to belong to the state. It doesn't all have to be equal, if you make more money by working harder or have a higher paying job it can be priced higher, but the availability of free housing at the bottom level undermines how much can be charged for more luxurious digs.
While the dream of free housing isn't achievable this way, AFFORDABLE housing probably is. If these container size homes are offered at a cheap enough price (say $5000) and cities zoned for where to put them and built the Frameworks they go into, charging say $500/mo rent and to hook up to the water, sewage and electric, this would put housing within reach of most people with min wage jobs.
Meanwhile, until then I still advocate for the Stealth Van & Trailer combo as the closest approximation you can have as an insurance policy against falling straight down to the street level sleeping rough level.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 20, 2024, 09:21 PM
Quote from: RE on Jul 19, 2024, 01:09 PMI agree that everybody who is able bodied physically and mentally should have to work at something and that everybody regardless of education or how brilliant they are should have to do some time each week working the shit jobs nobody wants but some people have to do all the time because they aren't qualified for anything else.
However, what do you do with the person who is just plain lazy and doesn't show up for work he doesn't like? What is the punishment for Laziness if a person is guaranteed food to eat and a place to sleep, shit and shower? Do you imprison them? Force them to listen to Rap Music?
RE
I had to go to work so I could not answer the question right away.
It would take more than one incident to label a hard case, but while at work an interesting thing happened. Before closing a couple came in to do some shoplifting. They each left with a full shopping cart, their take was in the thousands. They picked by price. Hard cases they are. Serious grifters.
If we confront a shoplifter, we will be fired and this causes the young men I work with to do nothing at all. I'm part time employed on the bottom of the totem pole. Actually not even on the totem pole. So it was not on me to call the police. I would have.
This was case where the police should have been called right away. Everybody working knew what was up, and the couple were in the store a long time to make sure that they would not be messed with on the way out our door. The couple should be arrested and jailed but in the land of plenty we just call what they do 'shrinkage' and pass the costs along. To this couple the huge new 'we prosecute shoplifters to the fullest extent of the law' advertised the fact that, no actually we do not. We just like posting signs big signs that lie to you.
In a world where we have eliminated homelessness and hunger not everyone gets a tenth floor penthouse and prime rib for dinner. A restaurant may have a free menu like a kids menu. You can have a cheese sandwich and an apple any time you want. Ordering something else would require a plastic credit card with a job or retirement so the card has a positive credit balance. All of which the state can provide. But everyone still has to work. Not paying bills would have consequences. Theft is still theft.
I have asked myself the question, how would your life (mine) change if your (my) socialist dream ever came true. You (I) still have to get to work on time, or my social credit score (work history) suffers. I have asked myself this question many times. What would be different. It has been a useful exercise.
Consequences we have for bad behavior now are inconsistent and as it is now, our society breeds criminal behavior. In a more planned economy BOTH consequences for negative, and rewards or positive social conduct (showing up for work or not) become consistent. More consistent than what we have now. A fact which no doubt, scares the pants off some people.
A right-wing nutjob fears society would fall apart under socialism because everything is suddenly free. They are wrong. Prime rib still costs more. We still have money. Rewards for behaving in a socially positive way would mean a family is be able to buy a house unlike they are able to do now. In a managed system rewards and punishments become consistent, more consistent than they are now.
People go off about China having a social credit score. I don't get their concern. What is an American resume, a credit score, and a clean criminal record but the same fucking thing. To get the good jobs I have had here required I looked good and show my papers. As I must do in any civilized system.
With expectations more clearly defined, most people would be able to live a more successful life. Define success as you wish, but a cheese sandwich and an apple does not work for me.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jul 20, 2024, 11:27 PM
Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 20, 2024, 09:21 PMIn a world where we have eliminated homelessness and hunger not everyone gets a tenth floor penthouse and prime rib for dinner. A restaurant may have a free menu like a kids menu. You can have a cheese sandwich and an apple any time you want. Ordering something else would require a plastic credit card with a job or retirement so the card has a positive credit balance. All of which the state can provide. But everyone still has to work. Not paying bills would have consequences. Theft is still theft. ............
With expectations more clearly defined, most people would be able to live a more successful life. Define success as you wish, but a cheese sandwich and an apple does not work for me.
This returns to my original proposal. NOT showing up for work does have consequences. The consequence is that ALL you get is the bare bones box to live in and mac & cheese you eat. If you are an ascetic who is happy with just this, you can live this way. But if you want anything MORE than this, you need to work.
You start with the Mandatory 10 hr/wk Community Service job that everybody must do. These are all the unskilled jobs from street sweeper to janitor etc that would pay min wage. They would be assigned weekly at the community employment office. Once completed, if you have another skill like Dentist, you can drill teeth and make more for those work hours.
There's still problems. People who do their community service job might be slackers. They show up for work and pick up the broom, but they don't get much sweeping done. They work slow and take long smoking breaks.
Then for the people with skills, if they are in short supply you might need say electricians to work lots of hours to get everybody's electricity going after an outage. So they don't show up for their community service job. If it's just once in a while, OK, but what about systemic shortages? Not enough Nurses, are you going to make a nurse work 10 hours pushing a broom?
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 21, 2024, 11:58 AM
QuoteThere's still problems. People who do their community service job might be slackers. They show up for work and pick up the broom, but they don't get much sweeping done. They work slow and take long smoking breaks.
The supervisor will write in his/her report that the individual is not be invited back next week. The individuals card balance falls to the cheese sandwich level. Bouncing around from job to job would identify someone who needs training.
No different than now, except that someone with a problem gets help.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jul 21, 2024, 01:04 PM
QuoteThere's still problems. People who do their community service job might be slackers. They show up for work and pick up the broom, but they don't get much sweeping done. They work slow and take long smoking breaks.
The supervisor will write in his/her report that the individual is not be invited back next week. The individuals card balance falls to the cheese sandwich level. Bouncing around from job to job would identify someone who needs training.
No different than now, except that someone with a problem gets help.
OK, what about the problem of professions with chronic worker shortages?
RE
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: K-Dog on Jul 21, 2024, 09:02 PM
QuoteThere's still problems. People who do their community service job might be slackers. They show up for work and pick up the broom, but they don't get much sweeping done. They work slow and take long smoking breaks.
The supervisor will write in his/her report that the individual is not be invited back next week. The individuals card balance falls to the cheese sandwich level. Bouncing around from job to job would identify someone who needs training.
No different than now, except that someone with a problem gets help.
OK, what about the problem of professions with chronic worker shortages?
RE
Those jobs pay better. People still get paid. How else are you going to get personal property if you don't earn money?
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Jul 22, 2024, 01:09 AM
That's not what I'm talking about. I mean on the requirement that everyone has to do some low level jobs to fulfill their social responsibility. Nurses would be needed to do nursing work during all their working hours. You could make the same case for Doctors and Dentists.
RE
Title: Enough With the Housing Crisis Already!
Post by: RE on Jul 22, 2024, 07:35 AM
Another article bemoaning the housing crisis, and another one drawing the same tired conclusion:
The crisis of housing affordability took years to emerge, and it'll take years to solve.
Yea, great, so what are we supposed to do in the meantime?
Now, he does point out Socialized Housing is an essential:
Whitzman was also quick and careful to point out that nonmarket housing is an essential part of any answer to the problem. In the United States, the idea of a green social housing development authority provides some hope for tackling two problems at once: housing and climate change. In Vienna, Austria, rents are much lower than similar cities in Europe thanks to its 220,000 socialized housing units.
Not sure where this green social housing development authority idea is coming from or who is promoting it? This is the first time I've heard anything about it. The example of Vienna though has merit.
The reason WHY not getting socialized housing going is brought up:
Shortcuts run the risk of tanking existing equity and the fortunes of those who rely on their biggest asset to make it to and through retirement.
As I mentioned with the Thought Experiment of the Free Basic Container Housing idea, if you offer TRULY affordable housing to everyone, then it will tank the value of housing all the way up the line until you get to the luxury housing for the elite, because nobody would move out of the free or even just low cost socialized housing until their incomes were really high, otherwise the upgrade in your living standard isn't worth the 50% of your take home pay it costs. So we are protecting the value of the Boomers homes so they have a comfortable retirement at the expense of having affordable housing for Millenials.
What really pisses me off here is the "Enough Already!" title of this article when it's just another contribution to what we already have enough of, which is people moaning about it, saying it will take years to solve and then not really doing anything to get it solved. They identify the CAUSE of the problem which is the financialization of housing and treating it as an asset which can be used for profit rather than as a social obligation and fundamental right of all the members of the society. Their long term solution is "years of rising incomes and stable prices to really make a difference". Where on the horizon are years of rising incomes coming from when we have had DECADES of falling incomes and rising prices, and nothing systemic is being done to change that dynamic?
So, once again, short of Revolution and/or Collapse, this problem is not gtting solved anytime soon and we'll keep on getting more of what we have already had more than enough of.
Anyone still living here must not think it is all that bad, otherwise they would have left for greener pastures already. How about that for a measure of how a citizen thinks about America? If you think of how the current slow movign American invasion is happening, it is because conditions elsewhere are intolerable enough to leave everything behind and make a bold leap into the unknown, and hopefully better. It was how America came about, and applying the same logic, if it was as bad as some think it is, why are they still here? If Venezuelans can vote with their feet across all the dangers between them and the US southern border, how ball-less are Americas to do it as well? Canada perhaps, it is a nice place, half of its speaks English. Some European countries would be nice etc etc.
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: Goldernen Oxernen on Mar 08, 2025, 07:04 PM
3.1 million is near enough to 1% of population.
I would spend more time outside under an annex, not just the small space inside. Have drop down zip up sides to an annex on the side, so you can enjoy breeze or block winds depending on weather
Problem is if you need place to have a desk and files, or a workshop and tools.
https://youtu.be/WA9bXY2QXaA?si=SILtR8MgTJVvQNae
Title: - Bugout Machine Subdivision Sprouts in Sunny California
Post by: RE on Mar 09, 2025, 05:37 AM
As long time readers know, I've always been a strong supporter of having a "Bugout Machine" as a collapse prep, not so much for civilization collapse asfor the more common local disasters or personal ones like losing your job and not being able to afford rent. I kept my BMs continuously from 2008 through to after my amputation. Always gave me an extra sense of security. One of my best interviews was with Van Dweller, who had been living in his van since the 1960s. He even lived here in Alaska for 3 years. 3 5 gallon cans of kerosene got him through the winters.
The subculture of people living this way is quite large, they have periodic meet ups each year in Arizona and Georgia to share ideas, strategies, good locations and meet new people. Sort of like nomadic HGs in prehistoric times.
Far as tools go, usually they carry quite a few,, many are itinerant construction workers.
Here's a nostalgic video from when I ran my food truck in the parking lot of my old apt.
Many more still up on the Diner Utube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/@DoomsteadDiner/videos). .
RE
Title: Leading Anchorage homelessness group raises alarm over ‘affordable housing emergency
Post by: RE on Mar 09, 2025, 07:58 PM
As you can see here in this article, the housing situation continues to deteriorate at a rapid pace, from an already pretty bad baseline. Far as political issues go, this one SHOULD be #1 on the Demodopes agenda and step up to the plate with a national plan for building affordable housing. If they start hammering on that and drop letting trannies compete in girls sports, they might actually win some elections.
Leading Anchorage homelessness group raises alarm over 'affordable housing emergency'