I spent a year in a permanent homeless camp in Arizona. It was a community. Everyone knew everyone else. Most folks worked when they could get it. Most had some sort of emotional problem that got in the way of entering the mainstream economy: a Viet Nam vet with alcohol problems; an out of work painter; a young couple with self respect, tobacco, and alcohol problems who saved their income and a bought a cheap Chinese generator gradually bettering their life style; an elderly man with cancer; a day laborer; and more. We kept the place clean and kept to ourselves. It was a quiet and peaceful place. I do believe that everyone there was living the best life they could sustain.
On rare occasions a sketchy group would passed through who committed theft and vandalism. A pair of local teenagers occasionally harassed us. On some Saturday nights, a guy would show up and scream insults at us. A group moved in and got into fights. The law warned them to end the violence or else. A few weeks later law enforcement drove everyone away. I don't believe that did any good whatsoever.
I spend a lot of time tooling around one particular pnw national forest and can anecdotally confirm that sort of camping activity has gone through the roof from summer '21 onward. While I'm sympathetic to the situations a lot of these folks are in (had some extensive conversations with campers) the bit in the article about environmental damage is unfortunately super true. I'd say that at least in my area, as many as half of illegal long-term campers put very little effort into trash disposal. These days, every time I go out I come back with a pickup bed full of bags of trash. Last time, I had to figure out how to get rid of a bunch of partially rusted through propane tanks. Yelling at individual campers about it doesn't really work because they're all constantly cycling through anyway, so in a week the same spot will have been trashed by another jerk.
One bright spot is that the FS, at least in my area, has been stepping up enforcement. A couple trips ago I ran into a pair of rangers who'd been turfing out RVs and issuing citations for litter.
Thats around the time that tons of Youtubers have taken off promoting 'vanlife'. Its all these older Millenials that promote a lifestyle of living out of your van/car because there is no future due to rising costs/climate change/collapse of society so might as well live now.
Are those necessarily mutually exclusive? Plenty of campers in this category manage to LNT. The sort of stuff I'm talking about is driven by being an asshole, not by having slipped through the cracks of society - if anything, IME those genuinely down on their luck do better with trash and it's the cheap vacation people who are really bad about it.
That aside, that kind of behavior eliminates this sort of resource for everybody, including those who need it most. A sibling comment mentions a camp getting shut down by bad behavior of a few. Letting trash accumulate to the point where a camping spot is physically unusable is in the same category of behavior. If you're concerned about those who slip through the cracks of society, you should be concerned about commons-torching abuses that cut off their remaining options.
curious wording, since after decades, it seems people that have seriously negative habits about trash and cleanliness, are also people with what amounts to toilet-training trauma and/or obesity.. these are are a few traits that coincide, not causation .. its a "soft" analysis !
secondly, people in the urban areas here that live literally in filth, are almost always abusing pain killer drugs
Sorry, I don't think I get your first point. Could you maybe elaborate a bit?
Re second point: same here, but (again, just in my experience) making it 200+ miles out of the city requires resources people in that category don't have. If you're camping in a national forest you almost definitely have at least a van, though I did once meet one guy who lived out of a bike with a trailer and a little Subaru ICE motor. Fwiw, I think urban camps are a different category of problem and I don't advocate for "sweeps" in that context.
I'm all for the right of people with nowhere else to go to camp on public land for as long as they want, but it is ridiculous to pretend that we don't all have the responsibility to be responsible stewards of the land. The suggestion that it is okay for people who are forced to camp to litter and destroy our public lands only gives ammunition to those who want to prevent such camping all together.
What struck me about that is that it could perhaps be reworded as a conflict over what 'property rights' mean. One of them is "right to destroy" and the other is "obligation to protect".
Viz, the "common lands" are lands which everyone has an obligation to protect so they can be shared not just with those currently alive, but with future generations. The "royal lands" is land where the owner has the right not just to deny others the use of it, but can choose to destroy it. Those property rights can encompass more than just land, and generally includes people (conscription is the exertion of 'right to destroy' over people, for example)
In Australia this has led to utter incomprehension on the part of the colonists when locals choose to be killed rather than let their property be destroyed. Their lives are so bound up with the obligation to care for country that without that obligation their lives don't exist. The colonialists found this convenient although their short term approach obviously leads to their own demise. Traditional lands rights preserved the country for 50,000 years, royal rights look to destroy it in less than 1000. Ooops.
"But according to royal libertarians, land belongs to the first user, forever."
I think this is the essence of capitalism. It's not like Marx said that private property is the problem. It is this first mover advantage that is carried forward into the future forever. The solution is quite simple, you limit landownership to a finite amount of time, it could be 20 years like patents or it could be a public landownership system like Singapore or it could just be a land value tax.
The problem is that you cannot replicate being first without urban sprawl, which exists because the privilege of others being first forever. So future generations are in debt to past generations and their descendants, simply because they were first to settle. We are born poor because the first thing we have to do is negotiate with those who own our surroundings.
Also, one particularly perverse situation is where indigenous communities don't register their land and some foreign investor comes along and registers it without their consent and often the compensatory payments are purely symbolic like a dollar per hectare for land that leases for at least $20 per year.
Capitalists claim to believe in free markets but private ownership of land is completely antithetical to the basic idea of a free market. In a market you cannot buy an infinite amount of something for a finite amount of money. But that's what land ownership is: control of a finite resource in perpetuity that you bought for a finite sum. You can buy some land for $10,000 then you and your heirs can collect an infinite amount of rent from it since you own it in perpetuity. Property and inheritance taxes are society's weak attempts to correct for this, but weak they are. This absurdity doesn't even include the absurdity of how the first "owner" of the land from which your ownership derives just took it, as you and the article I linked point out.
This piece includes a link to a piece about the housing crisis in Arizona. TLDR: they need to build a lot more housing and bureaucratic requirements for things like garages are a factor in the crisis.
I built 3 spec houses in Arizona. I don't feel that government regulations had a negative effect. In fact, on one occasion they helped me avoid creating a serious hazard. Building houses is seriously complicated, and dependencies are obscure. We don't build log cabins anymore. The regulations are needed.
The cost of building a house is the problem. Suitable land is hard to come by, and everything is expensive. One has no choice except to build high-end homes. Nothing else is financially practical. The cost is driven by unrealistic inflationary expectations, and I don't see any possibility of relief.
They are building a lot of housing in Arizona, it is mostly luxury apartments which contributes to the problem of affordable rents because it tends to increase the rents of neighboring apartments.
They also did a bunch of ‘condo conversions’ back in the real estate bubble which took inventory off the rental market and (from my non-scientific survey from driving a cab around the Phoenix metro area for nine years) they haven’t been putting any effort into affordable housing but just build massive, block sized, luxury apartments.
After the real estate bubble unless you want an hour commute all new housing is ‘infill’ and there’s a reason that a lot of that land wasn’t snapped up before. Now it’s super expensive, needs rezoning and quite often they’re tearing down multiple buildings to get a large enough lot size to make it worth their while.
Plus, they need a lot more water before they build a lot more housing. Phoenix is in the middle of the desert after all.
> They are building a lot of housing in Arizona, it is mostly luxury apartments which contributes to the problem of affordable rents because it tends to increase the rents of neighboring apartments.
This does not make any economic sense whatsoever.
From your sibling comment:
> Unless population grows faster than prices can decrease keeping demand high.
Isn’t it the population growth that’s causing rent increases? Not luxury apartments, unless you think luxury apartments are the cause of this population growth. I suppose that wouldn’t be impossible, but it’s more something you’d expect to see in places like Jackson Hole.
I’m less concerned about the “class” of new apartments that are being built. In any market there are only so many people who can/will pay “luxury” prices. The wealthiest will always move on to the newest, shiniest thing, but as those apartments age they should become more affordable. Whether they do or not is an empirical question.
However, if excess supply is being bought up by wealthy landlords, this is a problem because they will be able to drive the price up.
I wasn't criticizing your comment, more like clarifying mine. I've studied housing issues and homelessness. This is a nationwide issue in the US currently.
On rare occasions a sketchy group would passed through who committed theft and vandalism. A pair of local teenagers occasionally harassed us. On some Saturday nights, a guy would show up and scream insults at us. A group moved in and got into fights. The law warned them to end the violence or else. A few weeks later law enforcement drove everyone away. I don't believe that did any good whatsoever.