https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-14/california-homelessness-epidemic-licensed-tent-villages
The camps are managed by Urban Alchemy, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that has rapidly grown into a multimillion-dollar street services enterprise and embodies an elastic philosophy of shelter.
Aggressive marketing aligned with rising public discontent over homelessness made for a winning strategy. By 2021 it reported $51 million in revenue primarily from contracts for street outreach and shelter operations in San Francisco; Austin, Texas; Portland, Ore.; and Los Angeles.
The camps are managed by Urban Alchemy, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that has rapidly grown into a multimillion-dollar street services enterprise and embodies an elastic philosophy of shelter.
That entire sentence is cursed.
The hospitals in my area are all "non-profit." The SNF I worked at was "non-profit." They bragged that they were bringing in over a billion in revenue as a moderately sized regional health network when they were trying to recruit us in nursing school It doesn't mean anything other than they have to spend all their money by the end of the year, which is typically done by padding administrative and executive salaries obscenely while paying nurses and CNAs a pittance.
they have to spend all their money by the end of the year, which is typically done by padding administrative and executive salaries obscenely
You cracked the code.
A guy tried to convince me that all the high schools in his home country being privately owned was fine because they're all non profit lol
JUST BUILD A FUCKING APARTMENT BUILDING IN THAT EXACT SPOT AND GIVE THEM HOUSES YOU FUCKING GHOULS
Same reason why more mass transit can't be built: it won't be a profitable bazinga novelty making tech billionaires richer.
Lets just cherry pick a few lines
the ambiance of an Army field base.
guards are on duty around the clock.
some people preferred tents
Tents also “allowed them to keep the familiar environment
Aggressive marketing aligned with rising public discontent over homelessness made for a winning strategy.
$44,000 per tent
$44,000 per tent
$44,000 per tent
$44,000 per tent
$44,000 per tent
$44,000 per tent
$33k ANNUALLY per tent
33k annually. I hate Capitalists so fucking much it’s unreal.
More than a luxury apartment holy shit just give the homeless the money
Never doubt that a small
groupclass ofthoughtful, committed, citizensruthless exploiters canchange the worldensure that nothing will fundamentally change. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
What a fucking racket, 44k PER TENT for initial cost outlay?? What the actual fuck?
There are some "managers" making a goddam killing billing those funds.
That's taken the opportunity cost into consideration for using a field that could otherwise be sold for a profit. It doesn't cost a fraction of the money to simply put up a tent and hire some supervisors.
Ah but you forgot this gem
Miles to the east in South Los Angeles, more modest camping tents — like one might buy at a sporting goods store — line the parking lot of the shuttered Lincoln Theater, evoking something more like a Boy Scout jamboree.
So, this is it, huh?
We went from putting people on the moon with a fucking pocket calculator for a computer to "Idk, what if we just put the tents in nice, neat grids?" That's really the best we can do?
Yo, anyone care to chime in on why the US is seemingly addicted to only engaging with stupid solutions?
Real solutions would involve changing society somewhat and we can't do that.
That would be gommunism vulvulzula gorillion dead and who would innovate?
far more capital can be accumulated in managing a problem than from solving a problem.
additionally, providing for a basic level of dignified existence to all people would undermine employers' power over workers. i.e. the Reserve Army of Labor / "Why The Extremely Wealthy US Doesn't Have Universal Healthcare?"
Yo, anyone care to chime in on why the US is seemingly addicted to only engaging with stupid solutions?
Because LED car tunnel go brrr.
Real solutions can be appraised and given a realistic cost or profit potential. Made up dumb nonsense is better for a world that is fully financialized because the people who are supposed to make money have a monopoly on the ‘information’ and control the inputs enough that they can abandon their house of cards at exactly the right time to extract the maximum wealth and leave the public holding the bag.
Yo, anyone care to chime in on why the US is seemingly addicted to only engaging with stupid solutions?
Good solutions cost more, this one they get to have 44k per tent (and pocket probably 40k)
Happiness, rejuvenation and prosperity for all are illegal in the US, and more increasingly in the West.
Those achievements in space you spoke of, by the way, were driven by the US' need to save the legitimacy of capitalism in opposition to the Soviet Union and socialism. They only ever try to achieve anything when dual-power threatens to expose the liberal order as illegitimate, inevitably resulting in the revoking of all rights, dignity, and life itself to the global population. In this case, dual-power is not only exposing but also usurping the liberal order as the only sensible way forward (multipolarity and socialism in the pursuit of communism).
The US is now de-industrialized and cannot possibly run it back (collapsing the Soviet Union) for China's unstoppable rise as the most advanced industrial power globally, since the social and material conditions no-longer exist to pull it off.
- You will be miserable, you will be exclusively downwardly mobile, you will own nothing, you won't like it, and we relish in it.The US, along with capitalism and the practice of liberalism is on its way out the door and this is just them grabbing everything they can in the process. Expect these tent situations to eventually be reduced to sleeping bags and towels in the interest of exploring this so-called "elastic philosophy of shelter". Who knows, maybe they'll even go as far as to masturbate the idea of minimalism and mind over matter to get rid of even those further reduced accommodations.
It's not so much that the solutions are stupid, it's that they are in direct conflict and contradiction to the interests of the working class.
See this post here: What is Class Conflict? Karl Marx's Class Struggle Explained: Proletariat vs Bourgeoisie
If we built the homeless 846 sq ft apartments (and then gave them 33K a year), how would landlords extract 2K a month in rent for a studio apartment? How would walmart find people desperate enough to work minimum wage?
Good points. I will now dedicate my life to spreading the gospel of Milton Friedman.
The communist solution to homelessness: Give them homes
The liberal solution to homelessness: Means-based access to tent cities
Capitalism gave us every single problem that it insisted socialism would give us.
Wow, wow wow wow wow
Wow.
How the hell did the star trek writers get it this right?
They lived through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and knew how to connect a few points to create a line.
I'm just hoping they're right about the Irish Reunification of 2024
I should have known that we would find a way to do sanctuary districts but even worse. What's a little privatization between friends?
an elastic philosophy of shelter.
What the fuck does that mean and why do I get such an ominous feeling when reading it?
I get the feeling that soon we'll all be dealing with more elastic concepts, such as elastic concepts of food, water and environmental survivability
There is another for profit company running a shelter in my town....as a service provider I fucking hate it, but they (the county) literally open places up like this, throw a bid at already overburdened/underpaid front line workers and hope they come in and create a whole fucking new program from the ground up. And it's usually the ACTUAL Frontline workers who do this, not like middle management or whatever. At least in my case. Then these for profits swoop in instead. It's fucking weird
Idk if it says in the article, but Ted Wheeler agreed to work with them without any stakeholder input from the community, non profits, or actual houseless people. Disgusting
Edit for more context, I need to slow down when typing lol
Shelter services being run through half a dozen different agencies, each with their own overhead and inconsistent policies and levels of service. It sucks as a shelter worker, must suck even more as a houseless person trying to receive services.
Also the site in the picture is nightmarish. I've worked at some pretty nice outside shelters/tinyhome villages, but that looks like it combines all the worst parts of living outside and living in a congregate shelter.
(we should just give people homes, of course)
Oh my god I know. It's the worst when agencies are hostile towards eachother, too. Like we have a greater purpose to work towards here, y'all.
There are safe sleep camps operated by an agency in town and at least when I've gone to them they've been pretty nice for what they are. People can lock their doors and have pets and have at most 16 people living there. AND the huts only cost 2k whereas these tents cost like 10k for some reason?! They have to be embezzling money because there ain't no way...
Someone posted about how Houston actually uses a housing first model, and has all agencies work together in the continuum of care but they must all have a housing first objective, and they've decreased homelessness by 90 percent. In HOUSTON!! Housing first has been proven time and time again in the U.S. and all over the world that it works but god forbid you give someone a place to live for free when I have to pay money for it!!!
Tear Gas Ted knew that people were already aware of how shitty UA was from what they did in LA & SF, he was never going to allow democracy to get in the way of the grift.
Of course not. Man, this country makes me sick. I say it all the time but it never fails to make me more and more upset
This company is the worst kind of shady rent a cop type that flourished under the Trump administration and continues under Joe "Nothing will fundamentally change" Biden. They are grifters and bullies and take in millions to prey on homeless people to make rich people feel safe or whatever. They work as private security, skirting regulations about that by calling their staff "ambassadors" and just generally operate like a street gang. Urban Alchemy is a curse on the West Coast and they want to take their business model of public private partnerships between them and corrupt local government officials like Ted Wheeler in Portland or Mitch O'Farrell in LA.
So they are putting the homeless into security fenced camps and just hoping nobody draws parallels? I'm sure some people are truly much better off, but this clearly wasn't done for their sake. The purpose is to clean up and contain the homeless, it's all bigotry and property values.
you see it'd only be bad if the government did it. private companies doing concentration camps is the Spirit of FreedomIn this scenario, the homeless pay to be put in the camps. It'd be "socialist" to let them stay there for free.
And since it's a non profit, the company can avoid any pesky taxes.
Ah yes, the Star Trek Deep Space 9 episode.
You'd think ghettoes for the homeless are a bit on the nose, and yet the US is heading that way and on schedule too.
You see, if we concentrate our undesirable population into camps etc etc
everyone involved. death. their loved ones. death. everyone who has read even a single word of this shit and not instantly recoiled in horror. death
skin them and leave them outside this fucking atrocity as a warning
