Dystopian California in which counties are simply bussing homeless people around instead of building more housing or providing actual services. The very definition of sweeping problems under rugs, except there isn't even the pretense of a rug
I'm always appalled by the lack of empathy and the ignorance of some housed people who believe our homeless neighbors simply choose to 'live like that'. Dude, if you knew what they experience on the streets you would not even think that anyone would choose to live like that.
Two books (about other states) but that really show you what being poor in America is like and how expensive it is to be poor here: Matthew Desmond's "Evicted" and "Poverty, by America". They should be required reading
Sometimes I meet foreign tourists or people who are visiting and they say disdainful things about our homeless. I tell them the average cost of an apartment, and ask them if they make 3x that amount monthly. Then I tell them that's why there are so many homeless people. That helps often (with the visitors, who simply don't know).
With people who live here and who don't already know how bad it is, I feel like they're just not listening or they may even be straight up cruel, so I don't engage
@skinnylatte Sometimes I wonder if it's because people have bad experiences with homeless people but if my best friend, who ended up in the hospital missing his front teeth after he got curb stomped by a homeless person in SF while he and his wife were waiting at a MUNI stop about 15 years ago, can empathize with the homeless, anyone should be able to see homeless people as humans.
@douglasvb SF actually has a very large no of people for whom it is the only big city they have ever lived. I live in the TL by choice and I have not have a public safety issue. Learning how to differentiate between 'homeless guy having a bad day' and 'person having a mental breakdown' (who may or may not be homeless) is integral to existing in any major city, anywhere in the world, but especially exacerbated by the poor state of mental health services in SF and CA as well
@skinnylatte thank you for the book recs and the thread!
@skinnylatte I remember that in our politics/Civics classes in Germany when talking about the political system of the USA and everything there was an excerpt from an article or something describing a programmer in silicon valley with a small child, who was homeless and slept in a shelter. This was in a textbook from the early 2000s in Germany, and afaik the situation regarding affordable housing has only gotten worse
@skinnylatte I think there’s also some amount of othering to allow people to maintain the illusion that they too are not one catastrophe away from being unhoused. To face that would require addressing our economic system’s structural problems. Much of the US (all countries but it seems especially prevalent here) depends on a deep delusional state being maintained.