I guarantee I could produce a program that would be acceptable to conservatives and provide free housing.
Note also that Utah, a very conservative state, solves homelessness in exactly this way.
It just might be that the housing would not be provided by funneling huge amounts of tax dollars to the rentier class, and might involve constructing more houses, and therefore would be opposed by the left.
Yes that’s exactly what I’m saying. More precisely, they’re for public housing only if they can capture a lot of the funds to enrich themselves and their supporters and friends.
See also the book “SanFranSicko” by Michael Schellenberger.
That... sounds like political propaganda. What is with so many comments the past few months trying to pin societal issues on the left/California/woke bogeyman?
Don't confuse "democrats" and "the left". The left has historically come to power by seeking land reform and has a history of redistributing their land, at times violently. Think the Soviet Union, the PRC, or looking further back, the Paris Commune, the extreme strands of the French Revolution, etc. Democrats, despite the rhetoric from some circles, is a firmly conservative party that most people who would self identify as leftists would disagree with a lot of their economic policy as implemented by Obama, Clinton, and Biden.
a couple generations of ostensibly left individuals got co -opted and hoodwinked into playing team politics, because they grew up in a time when the economy worked better in general and the effects of politics in general were more subtle.
Additionally, the two party system has effectively declawed the vox populi and made the barriers to change very, very large.
This means that until we're out of boomers (and a significant portion of Gen xers) the isn't going to be a possibility of the sort of critical mass necessary to make the systemic changes we need to reconnect the will of the people with the behavior of the government / media / business machine.
Although, if we make it that far, I'm sure the well organized entrenched upper class will have a whole new set of tricks to try. It's very difficult to properly organize against them.
> I have never met a left wing person who is pro landlord, is this some weird American spin on "the left"?
It's a variant of a straw man that right wing people sometimes use. Which makes sense given that OP is forming their perceptions of the left from a book subtitled "How Progressives Destroy Cities".
I'm fairly confident by "the left" they mean "wealthy California liberals", so basically, not the left. If you think that by virtue of being the most "left leaning" cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles must be left wing, it's not that far fetched. Unfortunately this idea is undermined by actually having lived in one of these cities.
Indeed. The 'Liberal' cities are socially liberal, but economically conservative, so they are full of initiatives like legalizing marijuana and mushrooms and rainbow-painted crosswalks and naked bike rides, while at the same time, pushing back hard on any economic solutions to housing.
(Conservative areas are generally both socially, and economically conservative. I know someone will mention Utah's housing first program, and I'll cut them off at the pass, by pointing out that subsequent governments have been severely under investing in it.)
I wonder what "economically conservative" means here. Usually I would expect someone economically conservative to be against government intervention and prefer market-oriented solutions to problems, but the people you're talking about tend to want the opposite.
Directly? No. But indirectly? Yes. The rampancy of NIMBY, PHIMBY, and "anti-gentrification" attitudes leads to decreased construction, increased housing prices, and the enrichment of (existing) landlords at the expense of tenants.
It's not, but I didn't say it was. Plus the reasons that "the left" opposes housing are generally quite different than the reasons "the right" opposes housing.
They didn't solve it by 90%, they lied with statistics, and compared exponential-growth forecasted counts with point-in time counts.
The reduction was closer to 60%, and in the past few years, they've stopped investing in the program. It's been a good thing, but without ongoing effort and investment it will regress back to the mean.
If you guarantee you could do this, then do it? Plenty of states the left has no actual say in governance (MS, AL, SC, FL, TX) right now- perfect time to prove it.
Socialism becomes a lot more palatable to majority populations as long as minority populations are kept to a minimum. With a reasonable expectation that the recipients of help look like you, helping starts to seem more like an obligation than an imposition.
The loss of the distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor also caused many people who would’ve supported help to one of those to just throw their hands in the air and forget the whole thing.
That's what I'm talking about. The ability to hold back aid from the "undeserving" becomes a lot less important to people who live in relative homogeneity racially and culturally. Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally.
> Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally.
Utah is also heavily Mormon, which complicates things. Mormons have a lot of beliefs that sound fairly socialist when you describe them in practice, except that they believe the church should be the administrator of those policies.
Mormons also heavily oppose abortion, which makes them a nearly single-issue voting bloc, making Utah deep red in a purely partisan sense.
If somehow abortion were a non-issue - like, overnight, everyone somehow magically forgot abortion even existed - it's not hard to imagine Mormons being one of the least conservative Christian denominations.
(Yes, I'm aware that other Christians don't consider the LDS to be Christians, but that's beside the point)
Mormon conservatism encompasses a lot more than just abortion. Discrimination by gender and orientation are still doctrine, and to some extent so is discrimination by race.
A lot of hardline religious sects superficially look like socialism if you only examine their in-groups and entirely ignore their out-groups. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is no exception.
> Socialism becomes a lot more palatable to majority populations as long as minority populations are kept to a minimum.
You're getting downvoted, but you're broadly correct. There's a lot of research showing how more homogeneously white populations are more likely to support leftist or socialist policies (policies, not affiliation) than people of the same demographics who live in more heterogeneous places.
How does that concept reconcile with Mississippi having a low homelessness rate and providing housing at a high rate for those that need it despite a non-homogenous population?
The key according to this article is the cost of housing, not implied racism.
I have numerous conervative family members, acquaintances, and friends. That comment proves one knows one's adversary remarkably well.
Historical and contemporary conservative approaches to homelessness tend to fixate on criminalization and enforcement: more cops to break up camps, more pretenses to jail homeless persons, more opportunities for the prison-industrial complex to get its cheap labor. "Jail the beggars, jail the addicts, jail the crazies." Today, a century ago, a millennium ago... the dynamics between the rich and poor are basically unchanged; all that's changed, at most, is how the rich get selected.
Are you saying that jailing the homeless wouldn't be popular with conservatives? I'm quite sure it actually is (although they prefer running them out of town because that's even cheaper.)
Note also that Utah, a very conservative state, solves homelessness in exactly this way.
It just might be that the housing would not be provided by funneling huge amounts of tax dollars to the rentier class, and might involve constructing more houses, and therefore would be opposed by the left.