No Easy 'Cure' for Thousands of Youth Living on San Diego’s Streets
There’s all kinda news today about the economy.
Don’t fall asleep! I won’t bore you with the details about the 4.9% increase in gross domestic product, or how Politico has already published an article saying it’s all downhill from here, or how one year ago Bloomberg was tweeting about a 100% chance of recession.
Those of us who live in the real world all know that the only story worth covering in economics is the (mostly) bipartisan increase in the long term gap between the top and the bottom economic strata.
America’s Finest City is also, according to a tidbit in US News and World Report, America’s Most Expensive City. This is attributed mostly to the cost of housing.
NBC7 News chased this astonishing finding down ye ole clickbait rathole, finding Point Loma Nazarene University management professor Randy Waynick, who advised people wanting to exist in San Diego to make a budget and cancel subscriptions. (No Netflix for you!)
And there was this bit of unattributed advice:
The good news is there are things you can do to save and make money like dog walking … yard work … the side hustle list goes on and on.
It’s comforting to know fast food employees can aspire to exist amid the luxury apartment building boom downtown by starting the day with weed whacking at 6am next to my bedroom.
From the Times of San Diego:
Downtown San Diego’s 92101 zip code is the 8th hottest for apartment construction in the United States, with 5,346 units built over just five years from 2017 to 2022, according to a recent study from RentCafe.com.
This pace of development surpasses the achievements of entire cities, since construction projects usually take three to four years, said a spokeswoman for the a nationwide apartment search website.
The new apartments mean an uptick of 46% in the apartment stock of the downtown area, and more than half fall into the high-end category, she said.
Meanwhile a newly released report via the San Diego Foundation sheds light on the reality of our fair city.
The folks at iNewsource focused on the near super-majority of San Diegans who responded to inquiries for the report by saying they are considering moving away.
This year, the institute is seeing heightened concern in several quality-of-life metrics, including housing, climate and mental health. A majority of San Diegans also said they were concerned about hunger and poverty, jobs that pay a living wage, wildfires and public safety — all of which landed on the list of top 10 issues.
But the No. 1 concern that tops the list is homelessness — close to 60% of San Diegans said they were “alarmed” about the growing crisis, expressing the highest level of concern in the survey.
Homelessness is more visible in San Diego than ever before. Nearly twice as many San Diegans are losing their housing as those who manage to find it, and about 3,300 people citywide are sleeping outside every night. Meanwhile, people who want shelter in San Diego often can’t access it because the city’s shelter system remains more than 90% full.
The San Diego Union Tribune article was about the overall picture of what the survey found about the region. Here are the figures (drawn from 2021 data) relevant to poverty and need:
More than 1.2 million people — 38 percent of county residents — lived in households that spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing. And more than 550,000 people spent more than half of their income on housing.
219,355 people lacked health insurance.
Around 11 percent of people — 335,000 — lived below the federal poverty line. To put that figure in perspective, the report said that 93 percent of U.S. counties have a smaller population.
35 percent of county residents lived in households that did not earn enough to afford basic expenses.
85,956 children in San Diego County lived in poverty.
More than 16,000 of San Diego County public school students were unhoused, meaning they lacked stable housing. “This does not reflect unhoused youth who are in private schools, homeschooled or who are not in school,” the report said
Thirty nine thousand plus people reached out to agencies reporting data to the Regional Task Force on Homelessness; slightly less than twenty three thousand of those inquiries were related to homeless living situations.
The sixteen thousand students referred to in the report getting media attention included those staying temporarily with relatives or friends and other situations not quite at the living on the streets level. The RTFH says youth were 15% of those it served.
So, taking that percentage as a given, three thousand four hundred thousand students were served by the agencies tasked with serving unhoused people.
The San Diego County Office of Education estimates there are twenty thousand homeless children and youth in local schools, defined as "individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence."
Take your pick: 16,000, 3,400, or 20,000 young humans are lacking reliable shelter.
If being unhoused in San Diego was commodifiable, Wall Street would call it a growth industry. The total number of people lacking shelter as opposed to those finding housing has increased every month in recent times, and the underlying conditions (as the above referenced report indicates) show no sign of abating.
For purposes of the solutions proposed by liberals and conservatives, there are a whole lot of unhoused youth who, on the surface, don't require addiction or mental health treatment while their guardians are interred in a holding facility.
Housing with wraparound services is the vision for some advocates; others say only “cured” unhoused humans should have a place to live. Because the physical structures (housing or hospitals or treatment centers) don’t exist, and the people qualified to provide services are in short supply, some form of internment facility will ultimately be needed to satisfy public disgust caused by seeing poverty up close.
The soft version of this herding process, San Diego’s camping and overnight vehicle locations, is not sustainable, due to NIMBY opposition to new locations and legal restrictions on how publicly owned property can be used. It will only take one incidence of a crime heinous enough to warrant KUSI’s attention for the barbed wire to be strung.
The hard version (treatment first), besides not giving those undergoing such care a place to sleep, isn’t going to keep up, either. The temporary solution for these advocates is a dedicated location somewhere not near to where any of them live. By tradition, this facility will be referred to as an internment camp, as opposed to the real world term–concentration camp.
At the present rate of increase it is safe to assume that next year’s point in time count will be 25-33% higher than this year’s. It might be prudent at some point for some of our local keyboard warriors to ask themselves why it is that more people keep showing up on the streets.
Here’s a clue. I’ll give the County of San Diego credit: their program helping seniors facing displacement with financial aid is keeping some of the fastest growing segment of the unhoused population off the street.
The problem with this sort of direct assistance is that it flies in the face of the view that living on the streets is caused by being an irresponsible person. The (Ayn) Randian philosophy holds this sort of program to be inherently oppressive and, let’s face it, MAGAnomics is a close cousin to this point of view.
Coming back to where we started, the rate of GDP growth benefits people with various forms of wealth, and the more you have, the more you get. Now, if Uncle Sam got a (progressive) slice of this increased wealth, perhaps a social safety net would be affordable.
It’s really sad that the most basic form of that safety net, Social Security, doesn’t provide enough to cover housing in many places. And it’s getting tapped out, thanks to the impossible proposition that higher incomes should be exempt from paying in.
…And that’s before I delve into the great research underway proving that monopolies and duopolies make their money by screwing consumers and the tax man.
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Rest of the World News Shorts
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Justice Thomas’s R.V. Loan Was Forgiven, Senate Inquiry Finds Via the New York Times
In recent months, amid a series of reports of ethical lapses, the Supreme Court has faced intense public pressure to adopt stricter ethics rules, with several justices publicly endorsing such a move. Much of the controversy has centered on how wealthy benefactors have bestowed an array of undisclosed gifts on Justice Thomas and his wife, Virginia Thomas: buying and renovating the home where his mother lives, helping to pay for his great-nephew’s tuition and hosting the couple on lavish vacations that included travel aboard private jets and superyachts.
But in terms of its combined monetary and image-crafting value, few of those benefits can rival the motor coach. For years, it has served as a central trope of the justice’s “just-folks” persona: In speeches, interviews with “60 Minutes” and other television programs, and a hagiographic documentary financed by conservative supporters, Justice Thomas has extolled the joys of driving the motor coach through the American heartland in summertime and chitchatting with the people he meets in Walmart parking lots along the way.
Always left out of that telling, however, was just how much the motor coach cost — and how the financially hard-pressed justice managed to acquire it. According to title and other records unearthed by The Times, he bought it used in December 1999 for $267,230. (In today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation, that would be $493,700.) The title listed Mr. Welters as the lien holder.
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The inmates elect their new asylum leader by Aaron Rupar at Public Notice
The lunatic fringe emerged as the big winner of the three-week House GOP civil war.
After a brief period where it looked Kevin McCarthy’s exit might marginalize the “crazy eight” who voted to oust him and result in the elevation of a more moderate speaker, every single House Republican voted Wednesday for Johnson, a relatively obscure congressman from Louisiana whose boyish and smoothy delivery belie his Christofascist extremism.
McCarthy is no moderate, but don’t be fooled — his replacement is way further out there. Johnson not only voted to reject the 2020 election results, but in the weeks leading up to January 6 led the effort to persuade the Supreme Court to intervene on Trump’s behalf. He was once the spokesperson for an anti-LGBT hate group, supports for a nationwide abortion ban, and wants to cut social security and Medicare. The Guardian has a quick rundown of some of Johnson’s positions here.
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Calling this "climate change" is not enough Via Heated
The technical term for when hurricanes gain strength very quickly is “rapid intensification,” and the phenomenon is becoming more common as the planet warms.
That’s because greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning, deforestation and industrial agriculture are making the ocean much hotter—and hotter oceans make rapid intensification more likely.
But Hurricane Otis’s growth was on whole other level—so rapid and intense that some forecasters gave it another name: “explosive intensification.” In just 24 hours, the storm’s top-end windspeed increased by 115 miles per hour.