I’m in CA, so I’m no stranger to seeing encampments. Basically, camp sweeps are about the most pointless exercise in futility you can get up to. They just pop up in the next place, and the next place, and the next place, over and over and over. We’ve been trying this dumbfuck plan of “make the homeless so miserable that they stop existing” for decades now, and the problem has only continued to worsen. I’m kinda starting to think it doesn’t work. What does work, though, is housing, and lots of it.
I don’t think we should be worrying about busting up homeless camps until we can actually put these people up somewhere instead of playing stupid fucking games of “I don’t care where you go but you can’t stay here,” over and over every three weeks. We need to be focusing on building an a large supply of affordable housing, commie blocks even. I am, unironically, down for the Pacific states to just start laying down tracts of commie blocks. If your eyebrows just went up, let me point out that:
Commie blocks are better on every front than just having massive homeless encampments.
Given the choice between homelessness and a commie block apartment, a lot of people would gladly take the apartment. Not to mention a lot of East Europeans will speak fondly of having lived in them.
If you’re worried about the aesthetics of a commie block, maybe really take a moment to ask yourself if that makes any kind of sense, but in particular on an ethical level. What’s your problem with them, exactly? They don’t vibe with the US’ aesthetic pattern of [checks Google street view] building soulless beige-brown concrete and steel cubes? And is it really a worse look than massive homeless camps? And is that more important than getting these people housed?