/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Reduce urban sprawl.

I think homelessness is caused maibly due to lack of woods for homeless to camp out in, away from residential/commercial districts.

>>482369
>What is your take on this /leftypol/?
If it is illegal to be homeless, the state has to provide public housing.

>>482373
It won't prompt that though. These sort of measures just lead to what Trump was proposing: huge settler camps of homeless people dying early deaths in the woods and other inhospitable areas.

>>482377
>It won't prompt that though.
Not on it's own, but if you nudge it politically, it might. This is a gotcha-law, that is circumventing probably 100 other laws. Judicial institutions really hate it when legislators try to do this. There is potential.

>huge settler camps of homeless people dying early deaths in the woods and other inhospitable areas.
There is legal scholarship around structural violence, that considers it possible to regard pieces of legislation as a weapon, if it is designed to harm people or violate their rights. If they go through with this, and its not possible to protect the people at least make sure to painstakingly document all the people they harm with this. Political winds do change and then it'll be possible to plug this hole.

Reminder Mississippi of all places figured out an effective way to address homelessness: give people housing and don't ask questions. If Mississippi can do it other states can too.

>>482369
If r/SanFrancisco is the liberal/moderate Sanfraners I'd hate to see the conservatives.

They are explicitly stating they want the homeless locked up and they don't care, upvoted massively. Call them on their bluff about mental hospitals or rehab and they just start advocating about locking up the homeless.

I've never seen a more fashy subreddit this popular in my life.

Something about the USA is fundamentally and perhaps irretrievably broken.

Homelessness has increased 20% but it was already low to begin with.

And yet even with that tiny increase, people are… protesting the homeless with signs saying stuff like "keep the parks safe"

you CANT MAKE THIS SHIT UP

its SO FUCKED UP

I'd clock anyone holding that sign in the head.

Posted about this a few months ago: >>480778

>>482372
Homelessness is caused mainly by land speculation. IE speculators buy & hold a bunch of land, which results in a ton of vacant houses & buildings just sitting, which drives up prices as well as rents. Business rents are controlled by the same sort of speculative land cartels, which has a long-term effect of impacting jobs and driving the prices of goods up while wages stay low.

Taxing the shit out of land speculation would solve this incredibly fast, and so would building public housing. At present, construction of residential buildings is usually handled by private developers who get sweetheart deals from local governments and then build apartments/condos on the cheap for a market of rich people. This is a bad system. The US should disincentivize land speculation through taxation, and use part of the revenue to fund & manage good public housing, as well as full-time homeless shelters (and last-resort mental institutions) in major cities.

>>482386
A 20% increase is actually pretty significant.

Protesting homeless people is idiotic, though. The problem is that most cities, even where they don't expressly try to ban homelessness, try to treat homelessness as though it was a crime problem. Instead of taking the necessary measures to solve the economic problems causing homelessness, they just tell the cops to push the homeless from place to place. This inadvertently doesn't actually work that well, and so you end up with non-homeless local populations in the city getting mad because there are a bunch of crazy guys lingering around.

>>482388

90% land speculation tax

>>482388
Privatism is the MO of the AntiChrist.

For years all I hear is how communism is the system of oppression, the antithesis of moral soundness.


Yet, from what I see, capitalism is the enabler of vices, the seed of fbi.gov, and the toy of Luciferian elders.

>>482372
>>482401
I honestly think bandaid solutions like these sound plausible for people to have under the current system, but in reality reforming the existing system is so difficult you may as well go for the comprehensive, all encompassing solution: abolition of private property.

Taxing the rich and having a socialist society requires revolution at this point.

Also what >>482403 said.

>>482404
Socialist countries are the last types of countries that would treat drug addicts and non-workers humanely. The worst just jail all the non-workers and the other end provide them with free housing if they are lucky but with less benefits than the USA.

The countries with the most generous laws toward the underclass are capitalist countries with welfare state policies. The relevant US welfare state policies are gutted to the point of near non-existence in the case of housing.

But equivalents exist in Australia, Singapore, parts of Canada, and many European welfare states.

Socialist countries are formed by workers who hate nonproductivity. Capitalist countries, with their many flaws, at least have the potential to allow for a non-productive underclass to survive outside of jail, with the right laws, and many do.

>>482388
if you want to go after real estate, take into account that those have become hedge-funds, and you would have to defuse potential disruptions to the financial system. Also keep in mind that social spending for things like public housing also competes with other things like militarism spending.

>>482404
What you say is fair but there are band-aids that could be worth while, like allowing squatting in buildings that stay empty for long.

>>482407
I think you may be mischaracterizing socialist countries. Those had strong welfare systems. Generally had near zero homelessness and their prison population tended to be a lot smaller than that of comparable capitalist countries. Maybe the explanation is that those simply did not create a "underclass".

>>482408
> Maybe the explanation is that those simply did not create a "underclass".

Because they put the underclass all in jail or labor camps. The topic of this thread is criminalization of the underclass.

>>482407
There wasn't really any homelessness in the soviet union, at the very least it wasn't on the level that it is in any city in Canada right now for example. So you're just talking out of your asshole.

Also the success of socialism should really be based on the success of actual workers. You know the people that do all the work? It's kind of a worker supremacy.

>>482409
Ah yes the labor camp narrative. The reality is that the Soviet Block tended to have shorter prison sentences and fewer crimes carried a prison sentence. The incarceration rate was below that of the capitalist block.

>>482412
https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1961-2/anti-parasite-law

Soviet Union quite literally criminalized not having a job multiple times for long stretches of time

not fooling anyone

what happens when workers decide everything

stupid wagies

>>482404
>I honestly think bandaid solutions like these sound plausible for people to have under the current system, but in reality reforming the existing system is so difficult you may as well go for the comprehensive, all encompassing solution: abolition of private property.
I'm a Georgist, but I basically agree, and I think that's unfortunate.
I actually like Georgism better than communism, it seems less risky, but also the powers-that-be are so opposed to even an equitable tax and land reform that we'd need to have a violent revolution just to get it… and it's much more difficult to get people to do revolution for Georgism than it is to get people riled up for socialism, which has a much broader mythos and more radical stance against the status quo. Georgism isn't generally as compelling for disaffected people as Marxism is.

>>482407
>free housing
>less benefits than the USA.
Pick one.
Also, part of the problem is there aren't really much in the way of socialist countries today. The USSR, notably, had robust public housing. A lot of the problem with countries like the USSR wasn't that they didn't have enough public services or didn't have a strong enough public sector, it was that they were very suppressive, and fell prey to a lot of problems which were more products of dogma than anything else. There was contempt for all sorts of outcasts, yes, but there was also great contempt for such people in capitalist countries.

>>482408
>if you want to go after real estate, take into account that those have become hedge-funds, and you would have to defuse potential disruptions to the financial system. Also keep in mind that social spending for things like public housing also competes with other things like militarism spending.
The first thing isn't really relevant - who the landlords are doesn't actually matter. The only people to worry about are single-home owners, and an exemption or reduction can be carved out for them.
The government as it exists now literally prints money to pay for its military spending. We can't actually afford to do that when the US loses its hegemony, which technically means we can't afford to do it now, since the country has a fuckton of debt & the military spending isn't stopping China from outpacing us. The extensive militaristic spending is profoundly wasteful, and we'd have to stop doing it even if we didn't invest in housing and (other forms of) American labor. The handouts for the arms trade would have to stop no matter what we did, and investing in the wellbeing of the nation will have far greater returns, and will also be a much better deal if we fund it by taxing deadweight economic activity like land speculation which drives up costs.

>What you say is fair but there are band-aids that could be worth while, like allowing squatting in buildings that stay empty for long.
Not that anon, but this has been common practice for a long time. It's good, but it's not a solve for current issues, it's just commonsense policy.

>>482418
The thing about this, and I was hoping for an excuse to bring it up… the thing about this is that the USSR, when it criminalized homelessness/unemployment/etc., actually had massive public housing & employment services. It stands in stark contrast, in this regard, to the places in the US which are trying to criminalize homelessness now. People will point to the USSR's laws as cruel or draconian, and I wouldn't even disagree, but, unlike the United States, they at least gave the public opportunities to be in good standing. With that context in mind, it's far less cruel.

>>482432
That is correct. In the USSR you were more or less guaranteed a home if you worked.

However,they still criminalized not working for long stretches of time.

This thread is about the American homeless, a large percentage of which would be thrown in jail in the Soviet Union for not working even after being given a home. So there is little socialist theory has to offer considering most other socialist states have been the same outside Cuba sort of.

>>482418
>not fooling anyone
right back at you

The Soviets had full employment, the pay for full-time unskilled labor was enough to own a Kruchovka (budget cement-block apartment). Half-time was still enough to rent one. Skilled labor could own a Stalinka (nice apartment in classical architecture) or get a Kruchovka plus a Datcha (tiny vacation cabin). If you wanted to get a plot of land to build a village house for farming or whatever, that was free and many locales subsidized the building materials.

I'm not gonna lie Soviet housing was very spartan and small, you had to be a doctor, engineer or important general to get a fancy domicile, however from the perspective of the masses it was still superior to capitalist countries with comparable wealth. In historical terms Soviet housing was a big step forward, even if today a socialist system would aspire for something better.

>when workers decide
The productive forces of today are sufficiently advanced that it would be cheaper to build free public housing, than to make people homeless and torment them. If you look what it costs to incarcerate people, doubly so. Therefor this is the option that people would pick.

In many (tho not all) capitalist countries there is gaslighting going-on to make people hate an underclass. I imagine that would become harder in a socialist system. You know if a political system says it wants to create a class-less society…

>>482418
>Persons Avoiding Socially Useful Work and Leading an Anti-Social, Parasitic Way of Life
it's over for me T_T

>>482432
>The first thing isn't really relevant - who the landlords are doesn't actually matter. The only people to worry about are single-home owners, and an exemption or reduction can be carved out for them.
>The government as it exists now literally prints money to pay for its military spending. We can't actually afford to do that when the US loses its hegemony, which technically means we can't afford to do it now, since the country has a fuckton of debt & the military spending isn't stopping China from outpacing us. The extensive militaristic spending is profoundly wasteful, and we'd have to stop doing it even if we didn't invest in housing and (other forms of) American labor. The handouts for the arms trade would have to stop no matter what we did, and investing in the wellbeing of the nation will have far greater returns, and will also be a much better deal if we fund it by taxing deadweight economic activity like land speculation which drives up costs.

Honestly good take, but the military industrial complex is not going to yield funding easily. They see the shrinking empire as proof that there needs to be more militarism. That investing into "the well-being of the nation" has to look and sound like it's still militarism. You see it's not universal health-care it's universal combat-readiness.

>>482432
>>482443
The government could pay off its debt in a heartbeat. The reason it doesn't is because finance capital has a vice grip on officials and directly profits every time treasury bonds are issued. It indirectly benefits from the debt ideology it imposes over the government and by claiming its interests take priority over the federal government's. Remember Obama's entire cabinet came from Citigroup.

The Supreme Court says cities can punish people for sleeping in public places

In its biggest decision on homelessness in decades, the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public places. The justices, in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, overturned lower court rulings that deemed it cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment to punish people for sleeping outside if they had nowhere else to go.

Writing for the majority, Justice Gorsuch said, “Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many.” But he said federal judges do not have any “special competence” to decide how cities should deal with this.

“The Constitution’s Eighth Amendment serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges to wrest those rights and responsibilities from the American people and in their place dictate this Nation’s homelessness policy,” he wrote.

In a dissent, Justice Sotomayor said the decision focused only on the needs of cities but not the most vulnerable. She said sleep is a biological necessity, but this decision leaves a homeless person with “an impossible choice — either stay awake or be arrested.”

more:
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/28/nx-s1-4992010/supreme-court-homeless-punish-sleeping-encampments

>>482527
There's only one option left, the homeless have to become ninjas
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=osTeKSTvtC8

>>482529
>>482527
>>482443
>>482442
>>482440
>>482433
>>482432
>>482418
>>482403
>>482383
>>482373

Made a thread for raiding the liberal r/SanFrancisco forum who have been calling for the arrest of their homeless there in massively upvoted threads for weeks, join me in the raid

https://leftychan.net/i/res/1972.html