7 ms·

It's silicon valley, literally everything is for pay or be homeless

by jofzar 1mo ago

ltbarcly3 1mo ago
That's everywhere, there are homeless people everywhere. The difference is Silicon Valley feels so guilty about it's wealth it refuses to do the normal things that societies do to prevent people from living like animals because 'rights' or something, so they let drug addicts live in their common spaces without treatment. This normally isn't tolerated in a functioning society where people are pressured into behaviors that are less self destructive. When someone isn't competent to make decisions for themselves it's ok to pressure them into engaging in behavior that will lead them to get to a condition where they can start to make decisions for themselves. In Silicon Valley they have let their guilt be leveraged by a corrupt government system that lets grifters steal billions of dollars per year in 'homelessness funding'. Those same grifters fund political groups and bribe politicians. Anyone that questions it is accused of wanting to murder homeless people.
- estearum 1mo ago
  No, homeless people are not everywhere. Homelessness is created by high rents. High rents are created by high local productivity. The people who are productive enough to make it over the rent-bar are housed, and their marginal productivity above the rent-bar serves to raise the rent-bar (talk to any landlord about how they set rent prices: it's the local wages, stupid). This then pushes a greater proportion of people below the rent-bar, and then they are homeless. There are few places in the world more productive per square foot than Silicon Valley, ergo one must be extremely productive in order to remain housed there, ergo it has an extremely bad homelessness problem. That's why people making $200k+ (an extremely productive person by national standards) need public housing assistance in Silicon Valley (https://www.reuters.com/article/world/palo-alto-considers-subsidized-housing-for-salary-up-to-250k-idUSKCN0WQ0CA/ https://www.reuters.com/article/world/palo-alto-considers-su...). Which of course actually just... raises the rent again... The charities may be full of grift and whatnot, but you can remove them entirely and you will not solve the fundamental problem.
  - shafyy 1mo ago
    > High rents are created by high local productivity. Wrong. High rents have many reasons and also good policies to get them down and have affordable housing for more people, also in otherwise expensive and popular cities.
    - vlovich123 1mo ago
      OP has the demand part of the equation if supply remains fixed. The reason supply remains fixed is the US as a whole made policy changes in the 1970s that slowed down construction, specifically zoning laws and environmental laws swept the country. The 2008 recession also cancelled what little construction remained ongoing for a long time. When you combine that with spiking wealth in Silicon Valley, you’ve got the perfect storm in Silicon Valley. With OpenAI and Anthropic both based in SF, it’s going to be worse than ever once they IPO.
      - estearum 1mo ago
        The equilibrium for new housing construction will always be "just enough to keep it expensive by local standards [i.e. by local wages]." That's especially true with rising labor, material, and capital costs. It was actually the post-war housing boom that was abnormal, fueled by aggressive federal funding of suburban buildout. US municipalities are now broadly doomed to bankruptcy trying to maintain sprawling infrastructure that was never cost-effective to create in the first place. Look at Austin TX. Influx of new building, prices stabilized, and now construction is dropping off a cliff. No one can afford to build into a stable or potentially falling local market. Construction will start again when local productivity grows enough for people to bid the prices back up again.
      - shafyy 1mo ago
        Fundamentally, housing should not be a free market area that is profit-driven. Housing, like energy, food, healthcare and public transport is a basic need. Therefore, government policies making sure people with lower income can still get housing in a city they grew up in, where they work, live and have family, is important. Yes, one part of this is also building new housing and making sure that housing is built efficiently in terms of cost (but not throwing them on the free market, but making sure a certain % of it is desginated as social housing).
- bulbar 1mo ago
  That's not how it works at all. You can't pressure people into becoming a productive member of society. What you can do when it already happened is kill them or make them die in some ways, jail them or try to support and/or treat them. I hope it goes without saying that letting them just die or killing or jailing them is not an option in a western society. Prevention is much more favorable of course. For example, don't let people become homeless easily. But even then, a significant amount will become homeless.
  - ltbarcly3 1mo ago
    Until you accept that they didn't 'easily become homeless' the problem will continue. They used drugs and spiraled, usually over the course of many months or years, forced all their friends to turn their backs on them, got kicked out of any living situations they had access to because of drug/alcohol use or theft to support the same and finally ended up on the street. On the street they have access to almost endless support, at least in Silicon Valley, but much of that support is contingent on things like not openly using heroin or not repeatedly getting so intoxicated that they defecate or vomit on themselves, so they refuse it. I don't care how liberal you are, no society is functioning when it allows people to get on BART and pee on themselves and defecate on the cloth seats and walk up and down the aisles dripping feces and urine on the floor. That is allowed and nothing is done about it for fear of upsetting homeless 'rights' groups who are funded by the tax dollars meant to help homeless people.
    - amanaplanacanal 1mo ago
      Perhaps you aren't aware, but only about a third of homeless people are drug addicts, from the surveys I've seen.
      - salemh 1mo ago
        [dead]
      - ltbarcly3 1mo ago
        Here is how you get to 1/3: 1. Widen the definition of 'homeless' to cover people that nobody would consider homeless in every day language. Include anyone who is staying with a friend, living in corporate housing, staying with a family member, etc. Include anyone you possibly can that is unlikely to be a drug addict. 2. Narrow the definition of homeless. Don't consider people that almost everyone does consider homeless. Make sure to target the subgroups of homeless people that are very likely to use drugs. 3. Narrow the definition of drug use. Make it as hard as possible to count someone as having used drugs. Raise the evidentiary bar so high that even when you have evidence they are a drug addict it doesn't qualify them as a "drug addict" by the studies definition. Bury that definition so it's technically there but you have to go through the study carefully to find it. Lets pick a study in a big important journal and check it for the above: How about CASPEH: "Illicit Substance Use and Treatment Access Among Adults Experiencing Homelessness," JAMA, 2025 JAMA is a very prestigious journal: Who counts as a substance user: Only meth, nonprescription opioids, cocaine/crack count as addictions. Cannabis, alcohol, benzos, hallucinogens, inhalants are excluded. Someone who has a valid prescription to opiates, even if they are being abused, cannot be methodologically counted as a drug user. THIS INCLUDES METHADONE. What counts as addict: "Regular" = 3+ times per week. A twice-weekly meth user is 'occasional use'. They might take a gram and stay up for 3 days twice a week, but they are 'occasional user' and don't count in the 37% addict number quoted by this paper. What counts as addict: Last 6 months only. If you admit you used fentanyl every day for the last 10 years but claim you got clean 181 days ago, you are not a drug user according to this study. If they have been diverted from heroin onto methadone 181 days ago you do not count. How did they check? They asked each person face to face whether they used drugs and which ones and how often and just took their word for it. The real numbers from the raw data the study used: 41.6% of homeless self reported 2x per week or more hard drug use before they became homeless. an additional 23.2% claimed they started regular use after becoming homeless. That's about 65% already from their own data, 2x what the headline pretends. Excluding high use subgroups: to be included in the data, the homeless person had to prove they were giving informed consent. Then they additionally had to be willing and able to spend 45 minutes or so filling out the survey. The people with psychosis or who were intoxicated at the time of the interview were excluded. How many people have you walked past and they were incoherent, unconscious, or high? They were ignored in this study.
- YackerLose 1mo ago
  Homeless people are a better way to keep cowardly minions (I mean, valuable employees) in line than cops. The homeless are an important part of capitalist power structures. They are a visible reminder of the consequences for not meeting quarterly goals.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
- nixon_why69 1mo ago
  No, it's actually very unusual to have tons of homeless people next to spectacular wealth, California is a global outlier in this phenomenon. There are many, many places in the world that are much poorer and don't have homeless encampments all over the place.
  - ltbarcly3 1mo ago
    I literally said that.
    - nixon_why69 1mo ago
      You said "there are homeless people everywhere", which is technically true but omits quantity, and especially quantity compared to wealth. I'm not as positive as you are about what makes California (and Seattle) create/attract so many, but it's definitely an outlier compared to "everywhere".
      - ltbarcly3 1mo ago
        Yes, if you didn't understand my point: there are homeless people in every society, but most do not have as many as silicon valley because they pressure them into accepting the help necessary to restore their ability to make rational decisions. Rational people do not choose to live outside on the sidewalk like rats, people who are drug addicted and who have untreated mental illness do.
        nixon_why69 1mo ago
        I'd just be really skeptical of thinking I have the true understanding and solution to this issue. Like, do you know many addicts or seriously mentally ill? Have you tried pressuring them into being better? How did it work out?
        amanaplanacanal 1mo ago
        All it takes to be homeless is not being able to afford housing, drugs or mental illness are not required. You really think all it takes is "choosing" and housing will appear for you?

It's silicon valley, literally everything is for pay or be homeless

by jofzar 1mo ago

It's silicon valley, literally everything is for pay or be homeless

That's everywhere, there are homeless people everywhere. The difference is Silicon Valley feels so guilty about it's wealth it refuses to do the normal things that societies do to prevent people from living like animals because 'rights' or something, so they let drug addicts live in their common spaces without treatment. This normally isn't tolerated in a functioning society where people are pressured into behaviors that are less self destructive. When someone isn't competent to make decisions for themselves it's ok to pressure them into engaging in behavior that will lead them to get to a condition where they can start to make decisions for themselves. In Silicon Valley they have let their guilt be leveraged by a corrupt government system that lets grifters steal billions of dollars per year in 'homelessness funding'. Those same grifters fund political groups and bribe politicians. Anyone that questions it is accused of wanting to murder homeless people.

estearum 1mo ago
No, homeless people are not everywhere. Homelessness is created by high rents. High rents are created by high local productivity. The people who are productive enough to make it over the rent-bar are housed, and their marginal productivity above the rent-bar serves to raise the rent-bar (talk to any landlord about how they set rent prices: it's the local wages, stupid). This then pushes a greater proportion of people below the rent-bar, and then they are homeless. There are few places in the world more productive per square foot than Silicon Valley, ergo one must be extremely productive in order to remain housed there, ergo it has an extremely bad homelessness problem. That's why people making $200k+ (an extremely productive person by national standards) need public housing assistance in Silicon Valley (https://www.reuters.com/article/world/palo-alto-considers-subsidized-housing-for-salary-up-to-250k-idUSKCN0WQ0CA/ https://www.reuters.com/article/world/palo-alto-considers-su...). Which of course actually just... raises the rent again... The charities may be full of grift and whatnot, but you can remove them entirely and you will not solve the fundamental problem.
- shafyy 1mo ago
  > High rents are created by high local productivity. Wrong. High rents have many reasons and also good policies to get them down and have affordable housing for more people, also in otherwise expensive and popular cities.
  - vlovich123 1mo ago
    OP has the demand part of the equation if supply remains fixed. The reason supply remains fixed is the US as a whole made policy changes in the 1970s that slowed down construction, specifically zoning laws and environmental laws swept the country. The 2008 recession also cancelled what little construction remained ongoing for a long time. When you combine that with spiking wealth in Silicon Valley, you’ve got the perfect storm in Silicon Valley. With OpenAI and Anthropic both based in SF, it’s going to be worse than ever once they IPO.
    - estearum 1mo ago
      The equilibrium for new housing construction will always be "just enough to keep it expensive by local standards [i.e. by local wages]." That's especially true with rising labor, material, and capital costs. It was actually the post-war housing boom that was abnormal, fueled by aggressive federal funding of suburban buildout. US municipalities are now broadly doomed to bankruptcy trying to maintain sprawling infrastructure that was never cost-effective to create in the first place. Look at Austin TX. Influx of new building, prices stabilized, and now construction is dropping off a cliff. No one can afford to build into a stable or potentially falling local market. Construction will start again when local productivity grows enough for people to bid the prices back up again.
    - shafyy 1mo ago
      Fundamentally, housing should not be a free market area that is profit-driven. Housing, like energy, food, healthcare and public transport is a basic need. Therefore, government policies making sure people with lower income can still get housing in a city they grew up in, where they work, live and have family, is important. Yes, one part of this is also building new housing and making sure that housing is built efficiently in terms of cost (but not throwing them on the free market, but making sure a certain % of it is desginated as social housing).
bulbar 1mo ago
That's not how it works at all. You can't pressure people into becoming a productive member of society. What you can do when it already happened is kill them or make them die in some ways, jail them or try to support and/or treat them. I hope it goes without saying that letting them just die or killing or jailing them is not an option in a western society. Prevention is much more favorable of course. For example, don't let people become homeless easily. But even then, a significant amount will become homeless.
- ltbarcly3 1mo ago
  Until you accept that they didn't 'easily become homeless' the problem will continue. They used drugs and spiraled, usually over the course of many months or years, forced all their friends to turn their backs on them, got kicked out of any living situations they had access to because of drug/alcohol use or theft to support the same and finally ended up on the street. On the street they have access to almost endless support, at least in Silicon Valley, but much of that support is contingent on things like not openly using heroin or not repeatedly getting so intoxicated that they defecate or vomit on themselves, so they refuse it. I don't care how liberal you are, no society is functioning when it allows people to get on BART and pee on themselves and defecate on the cloth seats and walk up and down the aisles dripping feces and urine on the floor. That is allowed and nothing is done about it for fear of upsetting homeless 'rights' groups who are funded by the tax dollars meant to help homeless people.
  - amanaplanacanal 1mo ago
    Perhaps you aren't aware, but only about a third of homeless people are drug addicts, from the surveys I've seen.
    - salemh 1mo ago
      [dead]
    - ltbarcly3 1mo ago
      Here is how you get to 1/3: 1. Widen the definition of 'homeless' to cover people that nobody would consider homeless in every day language. Include anyone who is staying with a friend, living in corporate housing, staying with a family member, etc. Include anyone you possibly can that is unlikely to be a drug addict. 2. Narrow the definition of homeless. Don't consider people that almost everyone does consider homeless. Make sure to target the subgroups of homeless people that are very likely to use drugs. 3. Narrow the definition of drug use. Make it as hard as possible to count someone as having used drugs. Raise the evidentiary bar so high that even when you have evidence they are a drug addict it doesn't qualify them as a "drug addict" by the studies definition. Bury that definition so it's technically there but you have to go through the study carefully to find it. Lets pick a study in a big important journal and check it for the above: How about CASPEH: "Illicit Substance Use and Treatment Access Among Adults Experiencing Homelessness," JAMA, 2025 JAMA is a very prestigious journal: Who counts as a substance user: Only meth, nonprescription opioids, cocaine/crack count as addictions. Cannabis, alcohol, benzos, hallucinogens, inhalants are excluded. Someone who has a valid prescription to opiates, even if they are being abused, cannot be methodologically counted as a drug user. THIS INCLUDES METHADONE. What counts as addict: "Regular" = 3+ times per week. A twice-weekly meth user is 'occasional use'. They might take a gram and stay up for 3 days twice a week, but they are 'occasional user' and don't count in the 37% addict number quoted by this paper. What counts as addict: Last 6 months only. If you admit you used fentanyl every day for the last 10 years but claim you got clean 181 days ago, you are not a drug user according to this study. If they have been diverted from heroin onto methadone 181 days ago you do not count. How did they check? They asked each person face to face whether they used drugs and which ones and how often and just took their word for it. The real numbers from the raw data the study used: 41.6% of homeless self reported 2x per week or more hard drug use before they became homeless. an additional 23.2% claimed they started regular use after becoming homeless. That's about 65% already from their own data, 2x what the headline pretends. Excluding high use subgroups: to be included in the data, the homeless person had to prove they were giving informed consent. Then they additionally had to be willing and able to spend 45 minutes or so filling out the survey. The people with psychosis or who were intoxicated at the time of the interview were excluded. How many people have you walked past and they were incoherent, unconscious, or high? They were ignored in this study.
YackerLose 1mo ago
Homeless people are a better way to keep cowardly minions (I mean, valuable employees) in line than cops. The homeless are an important part of capitalist power structures. They are a visible reminder of the consequences for not meeting quarterly goals.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
nixon_why69 1mo ago
No, it's actually very unusual to have tons of homeless people next to spectacular wealth, California is a global outlier in this phenomenon. There are many, many places in the world that are much poorer and don't have homeless encampments all over the place.
- ltbarcly3 1mo ago
  I literally said that.
  - nixon_why69 1mo ago
    You said "there are homeless people everywhere", which is technically true but omits quantity, and especially quantity compared to wealth. I'm not as positive as you are about what makes California (and Seattle) create/attract so many, but it's definitely an outlier compared to "everywhere".
    - ltbarcly3 1mo ago
      Yes, if you didn't understand my point: there are homeless people in every society, but most do not have as many as silicon valley because they pressure them into accepting the help necessary to restore their ability to make rational decisions. Rational people do not choose to live outside on the sidewalk like rats, people who are drug addicted and who have untreated mental illness do.
      - nixon_why69 1mo ago
        I'd just be really skeptical of thinking I have the true understanding and solution to this issue. Like, do you know many addicts or seriously mentally ill? Have you tried pressuring them into being better? How did it work out?
      - amanaplanacanal 1mo ago
        All it takes to be homeless is not being able to afford housing, drugs or mental illness are not required. You really think all it takes is "choosing" and housing will appear for you?