An undocumented but well known side effect of the combination of curbside recycling and bottle deposits is that once the cans and bottles are placed outdoors, homeless people cut the bags open to fish out the deposit containers.
This makes a tremendous mess, and the city recycling trucks often won't pick up the the bags once they have been shredded, and it creates litter up and down the street -- it probably costs 5x as much to clean up after the homeless as they get off of the bottle deposits, and this is after they've already performed the labor of separating the solid waste stream.
For this to happen, a couple things have to be in place:
1: Ordinary people have to find the deposit so small as to not be worthwhile, so they chuck the cans in with their normal recycling rather than returning them to claim the deposit.
2: The recycling has to go out in bags rather than bins or carts.
I'm in Michigan and even our 10¢ deposit, which was impressive in the 1970s, has ceased to be worthwhile for many people. We should've upped it to 25¢ a decade ago, and expanded it to include juice and other noncarbonated things, but I digress!
However, my city uses a big rolling bin for recycling, so there's no bag to slice open. If someone wanted to root through the bin, they could do so without making a mess.
(And if they decided to dump the bin on the street, after once occurrence I'd be sitting on the porch on trash night with a blunderbuss full o' rock-salt...)
I'm in Oregon and our deposit is 10¢ as well, we also have the big bins/carts. The homeless around here will pull everything out of our recycling bin a lot of the time to find cans. Most of the time they'll put it all back, but sometimes they wont, and I'll find my trash/recycling littered about the street.
It also has the effect that almost everyone in my area leaves their trash cans on the street, because if you put them somewhere near your house the homeless people will find it, and invite themselves up onto your property.
In response to #1, Manhattan real estate costs over $1k per square foot, often more. Adding a third container/bag to everyone's trash area would eat up far more capital in real estate than it would produce in income.
#2: Manhattan is super dense, and there's no place to put that many bins. Bags scale better than bins anyway, and a lot of buildings use trash compactors which work far better with bags. Finally, there's not enough room between parked cars to get bins from the sidewalk to the street easily.
Its a straightforward side effect to avoid as well, don’t use bags. Austin and Chicago come to mind as cities that don't accept bagged items for recycling. Neither has bottle deposit but I don’t see it being a huge issue to add, if they so chose.
The 5 cent (or more) recycling deposit has always made sense to me as essentially a littering/co-mingling tax. Pay a little at purchase which funds the collection and proper disposal/recycling.
The article notes that the 5-cent deposit is hampering recycling rather than helping it.
The Natural Resources Defense Council noted that expanding the bottle deposit would "punch a hole in the economic model of curbside recycling." That's because recyclers "want the good stuff, we want the metal and the good plastics."
Whether a can is recycled by curbside pickup or by bringing it to a redemption center probably doesn't really matter environmentally. Curbside might have an advantage if they can more efficiently collect them (using less fuel and such). In this case, removing valuable recyclables like metal and good plastics from the curbside stream means making curbside recycling less valuable overall. It's transferring money from the city to the individuals collecting the cans.
I'm definitely not faulting the people collecting the cans. They're trying to make ends meet in a city that can be tough. However, for the environment, the bottle deposit doesn't seem to be a tax that helps out recycling - it's a tax that hurts recycling.
If the state expands the bottle deposit to include more bottles, it will remove more high-value recyclables from the curbside recycling stream. Those high-value recyclables subsidize the recycling of less valuable recyclables. That means that we lose the funding for a lot of our recycling.
It's ultimately a poor use of human time to just be moving things around. Rather than entering the curbside stream and getting recycled, people do a lot of more labor so that they...get recycled. The end result is the same, but there's more human labor used, more fuel used, more costs paid, etc. And it makes curbside recycling of other items less economical.
What do you mean by recycling? Melting down the bottles to make “new” glass? That’s extremely energy intensive, compared to just cleaning and refilling, which is what is done to deposit bottles (at least here in Germany)
The US doesn't use that much glass compared to aluminum and plastic. Aluminum recycling is very efficient which is why recycling centers really want it and refilling aluminum cans doesn't work well compared to glass because they deform and crumple a lot. Recycling aluminum takes about 5% of the energy of creating new aluminum.
By removing aluminum cans from curbside recycling, they're just adding additional steps and labor to recycling the cans.
Looking into the German system, it's really just glass bottles that can be refilled. Glass bottles are pretty uncommon in the US except for beer (and even with beer, I find cans way more common). You're definitely right that recycling centers aren't looking for glass (probably because it's energy intensive), but they are really looking for aluminum (because it's so easy to recycle).
The number of re-used bottles is down 30% in Germany in the decade after the bottle deposit scheme was created in Germany. Almost all bottles are getting returned (97-99%), but stores have been moving away from refillable glass bottles.
Yep, cleaning and refilling is great for glass, but glass is pretty uncommon in the US. Their use is steadily declining in Germany too and less than half are re-usable today. That might mean that it still makes sense to run this in Germany, but does it make sense to have a deposit for non-reusable bottles?
Whether an aluminum can goes into curbside recycling or is returned to a store for a deposit doesn't make much of a difference - it's going to be made into recycled aluminum. A glass bottle might be simply cleaned and refilled. So, we don't care where an aluminum can goes as long as it's recycled. We do care that a glass bottle is returned. So it makes sense to maybe put a 15 cent deposit on the glass bottle that can be redeemed while it might make sense to simply put a 5 cent tax on the aluminum can which you can't get back.
But some of this is culturally relative. Some places have big problems with people littering bottles and cans. A bottle deposit means that people won't just throw the bottle on the ground - or if they do, someone else will collect it for the deposit. The Irish plastic bag fee helps the environment because it got people to stop using so many plastic bags, but one of the most visible differences is the lack of plastic bag litter all over town.
Given Germany's high level of re-usable bottles, the return scheme probably makes more sense there. Articles also indicate that there may have been problems with bottle litter of non-reusable bottles and the deposit gives people an incentive to redeem the bottles (even if they're collected by Pfandsammler rather than the original owner). However, given the US' low rate of refillable glass, it seems to make less sense here. At least in my area of the States, it's illegal to drink alcohol in public and soda is the only other item with a bottle deposit. Seltzer, sports drinks, bottled water, etc. don't have a deposit. Still, we don't have a lot of cans and bottles becoming litter so we aren't as worried about that. As such, it seems more worthwhile to have the aluminum recycled efficiently via curbside pickup rather than individual transported, counted, etc. just to end up with the same fate.
One big thing is that, at least from anecdotal experience, the bottle or metal deposits are dedicated to bottles and metal cans, and so theyre pretty clean. People in the US are bad at not contaminating their normal recycling, which is part of why China stopped accepting imports of US recycling.
The glass bottle plant in my home town in the 60's did melt them down. Back then you could get the deposit back by taking the bottle into the store. And the plant had tours which showed the recycling operation to us school kids.
This doesn't mean that it makes economic sense to do the same thing 50 years on.
That's not what's done when you deposit bottles in most automated "reverse-vending" machines in the US, it gets crushed/shredded then recycled off-site
That being said, this article shows the German version of that, and it looks identical:
The action described also seems identical the the US version:
>Almost all German supermarkets have sophisticated “reverse vending machines” that will weigh and scan your bottle to match against a list of acceptable shapes and sizes.
>If your bottle is not on the retailer’s list, the machine spits the container back at you. If it matches, the bottle goes down a chute for either recycling or shredding, and the machine hands you a voucher with the added-up Pfand that you can then cash in at the till.
Germany has separate deposit systems for refillable and single use containers. Deposits for refillable bottles exist for both glass and a form of heavy duty reusable plastic. It is entirely unregulated but has nonetheless evolved to a high level of standardization. Most refillable glass bottles are one of a few standard shapes so it's rare to get a bottle rejected (all the branding is on single-use paper labels). Refillable glass is mostly the realm of local brands that have been doing it for decades, refillable plastic is limited to big brands like those of the Coca Cola Company.
The deposit for single use on the other hand is mandatory (intended primarily to remove the convenience disadvantage of refillables) and is the realm of discount and/or novelty beverages. It was only introduced somewhat recently (post 2k) which means that most supermarkets have separate reverse vending machines if they automate returns: those for refillable, which need a large storage area in the back for the big volume of whole bottles and crates and those for single-use which can be placed anywhere because the containers are crushed.
There's usually two types of reverse-vending machines in a German store: One that takes refillable bottles from glass or hard plastics to be brought back to the bottler, which have been part of a deposit system for ages, and another one for disposable plastic bottles, for which a deposit system has been started about 15 years ago. Those disposable bottles are shredded on site and brought to a recycling plant.
The first system makes ecological sense, the second one not so much (but it reduced litter for sure).
Well your second quote states that bottles are either recycled or not.
There are reusable and disposable plastic bottles. The disposable ones are of really thin plastic and crushed, yes. The reusable ones are put into crates and return to the factories so that they can be cleaned and refilled.
You can actually look through the machine and see the stacks of crates in the room behind them.
Many glas bottles (e.g. for beer, water and more) are reusable, too. They’re treated like reusable plastic bottles. Disposable glas does not have a deposit on it. You take those to a bottle bank (? containers on the street you throw them into), which is emptied once every two weeks (not too sure on the frequency).
Cans are the only type that is always crushed on return, afaik.
Here, have a random statistic - they talk about the decrease in percentage of beverages offered in reusable packaging:
https://de.statista.com/infografik/amp/8077/anteil-von-einwe...
It’s apparently “only” 42% for reusables, compared to 56% for disposable ones. It’s not perfect, but It’s better than what pretty much everybody else in the world is doing.
Just look at historical data with inflation. The $0.05 deposit has been around "forever." When it was created, a nickel was worth much more than it is today.
> Whether a can is recycled by curbside pickup or by bringing it to a redemption center probably doesn't really matter environmentally.
In Denmark, only the plastic and metal collected by returned deposits is considered clean enough for reuse as food packaging.
Knowing this, I will give my empty bottles to the people roaming the streets rather than put them in the recycling bin. (I rarely have enough for me to think it's worth returning them myself.)
The redemption rates of deposit bottles are really high — it’s >65% in places like NY and ~80% in Maine, where more categories are returnable.
Deposits drive economic decisions, especially if they go up. If you were paying a $0.25 deposit on a 12-pack of soda, perhaps you’d choose a more efficient larger package.
Agreed, it pushes the purchaser to bring it back and also ensure the materials are triaged properly. If they don't, then someone else can collect the refund.
If it was me I'd put the deposit to 10¢. More people would actually return them, and those who depends on it to make the ends meet wouldn't need to gather as much to make the same amount.
That would also probably be fair given that nickel deposits were mostly decided on decades ago.
The first $.05 bottle deposit law was created in 1972. That would be equivalent to about $.30 today. That would be a much more compelling amount for a modern day citizen to recycle for.
Michigan's deposit is 10 cents per bottle/can. 97% of bottles and cans are recycled, even while Michigan's recycling rate of other materials is pretty low.
Exactly what you described is what happens: If the purchaser doesn't recycle the cans, someone else will. Charities and other people will ask for cans to recycle, and some people will comb through trashcans to get a couple of bucks of empties.
But it's such a small deposit. I'd rather see a $1 or $2 deposit to encourage more people to do their own recycling, to discourage single usage containers, which I think the US's culture would benefit from.
Heck, even at 2.5 and 5 cents, California had a bottle recycling rate of 102% a few years back. Just bringing legit bottles across the border was a profitable activity until they started cracking down.
That's an interesting point. I bet the price of plastic has gone down since the original value was chosen. I wonder what price point makes fraud economical on a large enough scale to attract someone with access to manufacturing...
I agree wholeheartedly. It should be a much bigger deposit, and then bottles should be reused rather than recycled (which is the worst of the three things we should be doing).
On Ontario, Canada it's simply a way of life that you bring in a box of empty beer bottles and put them on a rack on your way into the beer store in replacement for the box of full beer you're about to pick up. So in that way you only ever pay the deposit once.
These people profiled aren't collecting litter. They're diverting an already well sorted and collected stream that should have gone to the City and stealing the revenue for themselves.
Are the deposits applied to the self-serve plastic cups? Also, I believe, the deposit on plastics should be higher than on cans. Recycling or not we should do more to discourage the use of plastics.
I think this is important. I also don't think having 5 cent recycling deposits make sense anymore where recycling is mandatory in nyc, there's no reason for a financial incentive. There's got to be a better way to create demand for labor for the people resorting to this, also to just provide services to them with tax money, as opposed to this industry that's created around taking already sorted recyclables and re-appropriating them. The whole thing seems really inhumane and it's funded by the existence of the deposit tax.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but your desire not to see human desperation and to remove the things that make it apparent, does not make it go away.
People do these jobs because there's a market for the items in question, and because they're poor. Taking away a deposit (which helps lubricate the return process of useful materials and gives people a reason to value them) for your conscience sake will not make the poverty go away.
Clearly people do throw away cans and bottles when it's not convenient, and these people who clearly don't have better opportunities in front of them, get some minimal (though unfortunate) employment which they choose to do.
Go work to eliminate poverty. Not the outward indicators of it.
I’ve often pondered this too. I think it is ok for jobs to exist that aren’t intended to provide a living wage due to the nature of the job, perhaps targeted for seniors in high school, or someone looking to add their very first entry to their resume.
But what happens when those are the only jobs available for someone who _needs_ a living wage? I don’t know the answer.
An example comes to mind of someone who gets caught needing to work two or three of these jobs just to make rent, who doesn’t have time to get educated, because there is no spare time. I would like to think that this is where some outside intervention supplements that persons income so they can devote a few hours a week to learning a trade. In my limited experience with state programs for this, it feels nigh impossible.
> I think it is ok for jobs to exist that aren’t intended to provide a living wage... But what happens when those are the only jobs available for someone who _needs_ a living wage? I don’t know the answer.
The root of the problem is that a "living wage" in New York City is way, way too high. This is because the rent is too high, which is in no small part because of local housing policy, which does not want to see more apartments built, preferring to play games with rent control. (And economists are fractious in general, but the consensus position that rent control is destructive is as strong as the consensus of climate scientists on anthropocentric global warming.)
(In part this reluctance to build is because of other broken policy, such as the transit-construction policy, which means that new subways to these new apartments are impossibly unaffordable.)
But referring to it with the "living wage" mindset, we set about blaming employers for being evil, instead of fixing the broken housing policy. The consequence is that people who needed the higher wage to begin with are even more likely to be unemployed, as their employment is no longer profitable, and entry-level positions (for people who didn't get a fancy college degree in engineering, anyway) are unavailable.
There are other policy failures, of course. For instance, New York's education policy continues to fail its most vulnerable population, preventing them from obtaining skills that would render their labor more valuable.
> But referring to it with the "living wage" mindset, we set about blaming employers for being evil, instead of fixing the broken housing policy.
Not really, maybe you have the connotation between "living wage mindset" and "blame employers as evil". But as an American living abroad in Switzerland, where a strong currency exists but is undesirable, no federal minimum wage exists, no local minimum wage exists (except in 1 Canton), and labour is well represented in the political economy (>50% workers under coverage of various Collective Bargaining Agreements), it's clear there's a lot of wiggle room where things are not black and white, where we could try to push for a culture that both respects the commons and community as well as individual freedom. This different mindset and culture is why a "livable wage" works here despite the lack of regulation and without workers demonizing employers and vice versa.
I don't think such a mindset could be adopted by most Americans but it certainly shows there's no reason for a black-and-white mindset of "livable wage advocates" == "employer haters".
because the economy isn't a collection of uncoupled agents - if the employer doesn't "sacrifice" to provide a living wage then that employee can't buy goods from customers of the employer and so then those customers reduce their orders with the employer.
That’s not necessarily true. It could just mean that our exports are uncompetitive because of a dollar that trades too high, making foreign products cheap and domestic products expensive. After 30 years of a strong dollar with liberal trade agreements, there are now more structural reasons for the smaller manufacturing sector and the difficulty of ever moving expatriated production back on shore.
The fancy words need to be unpacked so the two perspectives espoused can be brought together, please allow me.
First off, that's not quite what they said. They said, "that labor will never be available to US residents. Quite a different thing than "employers". The math changes when you, US citizen, have to sign the checks, with your own money, earned from a 'real' employer.
Now the dollar policy in theory matters. With a stronger dollar, it's harder for US citizens to buy and sell goods domestically and it's cheaper to buy them abroad. Cheap Asian electronics, more expensive American goods. Applies to labor as well. Employers found it cheaper at some point to outsource labor whenever they could abroad.
That's the theory. Reality is that the dollar hasn't been strong for some time now. Employers still outsource labor where the trade-off is worth it. But the trade-off isn't always worth it anymore. Jobs are coming back to America. But not the jobs that would pay a living wage to someone who would sell that labor gathering cans off the street.
That would require the dollar to fall another order of magnitude, totally upending global commerce and jettisoning the idea of the dollar being the global reserve currency even deader than it already is as we fritter away our goodwill and the de facto hegemony it provided. The dollar floats on the public markets and there's been no political will to do anything more than pay lip service to strong dollar policy.
America has never been kind to its underclass, temporarily embarrassed millionaires they must be like the rest of us. The problem is our over-reliance on markets. Markets do one thing and one thing well, serve individual self-interest. They cannot serve public interests except when the public interests align with individual self-interest. To a market, an incentive is an incentive, questions about how humane they are are questions that cannot be answered by a market.
To a market, your labor is a good that you sell, and the market, being human interest, has as much interest in getting your offered labor for as cheaply as you're willing to offer it as you are interested in getting all the things you want for as cheaply as possible. This is all supposed to work, and by that I mean it requires the whole country to participate in the creation of a grand fiction. Religious society declined in the 70s and with it went the American predilection for grand fiction. Now we're left with the ugly truth behind the fiction and we don't even have comforting lies to sell to the underclass anymore.
I don't know what the way out for us is, but I do know how some European countries found a way through it. There's the Nordic model. A ton of wealth was generated through resource extraction and is now held at the state level, creating the same effect that university endowments do for their ecosystem. This does not typically happen with resource extraction economies, particularly large ones, look to Russia for where that goes wrong. The Nords got lucky due to a shared culture and very few external geopolitical threats.
We could discuss France and Germany, but this is getting long so I have to cut it short. Europe in general can leverage shared culture that goes back thousands of years, while the US built its in all of some 300 years, counting from around when the settlements first started taking off. This makes a lot of things much much easier, as culture is generally how humans solve coordination problems.
In many ways we're more of an empire than a nation-state. Multi-ethnic empires have to be governed according to different principles than nation-states. "American" as an ethnic identity still needs to gel. The Internet is bringing about a "universal culture" that might get us further to an answer but in the meantime Americans are having to re-learn how to be charitable.
I get the desire for living wages. I really do. But they're expecting the market to solve the problem for us. That fiction is deader than Jimmy Hoffa. America has spoken, and we do not want anything getting in the way of the almighty market. So it's humans that must solve the humanity problem that inhuman markets cause. Charity for your fellow man, expect more tipping culture and more browbeating to donate. Sorry.
There are two major policy failures on display here. The first is that there isn't enough housing in the city, and they're basically never going to build it. The second is that the city needs to get better waste management technology, instead of just leaving trash out on the streets to feed the rats.
There is plenty of housing. Normal market dynamics here are totally fucked because of the rent stabilization, rent regulation, and short term rental companies such as Airbnb.
Last I looked nearly half the apartments were in one of those three categories. Rent is fucked because supply is fucked because we fucked it with various programs.
Or this lovely article by the Brooklyn borough president which opens with a story of a rat gnawing on an infant's face, in the slums of Brownsville. The child then grew up with a scar on his lip. (There's probably another policy failure there, too, with regards to public housing, as NYCHA is not good about extermination.) https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-our-war-on-rats-...
Homeless people (a prime bottle-collecting group) are if anything more vulnerable to rats, as they are likely to be sleeping where they are exposed to said rats.
And New York trash policy in much of Manhattan is your building leaves your trash (recyclables and otherwise) out on the sidewalk for pickup, where it is rodent-bait. This needs to change.
Fun fact: Poland Spring bottles can be returned for a 5-cent deposit, unless they have a thin red line on the label, in which case they are worthless to deposit collectors, and just end up in the trash. (The red line is an indicator that the bottle came from a 24-pack.)
I have a great deal of sympathy for these people and it's a shame that the way zoning works it's difficult for there to be enough cheap housing built where people need it.
However, I have some questions for the NY Times:
1. What does the fact that there are people paying $13,000/month rent have anything to do with the people collecting cans?
2. They're stealing from the City, as you point out. Why isn't this wrong?
3. How much tax-free money are they earning? Combined with the benefits they're receiving from Federal Government, City, and State with this untaxed revenue stream, what's their income? How much would a person who pays taxes have to earn to net the same amount?
This is an extraordinary comment, especially in how ghoulish it is. It makes a head fake towards the "welfare queens" myth, ignores the fact that collection is decriminalized and calls it "stealing", and best of all, the commenter makes the off handed implication that this story is emotional manipulation.
I wonder if HN really thinks journalism should have the writing of an API documentation.
There's a difference between "decriminalized" and "legal". Certainly we shouldn't fill jail cells with recycling thieves, but we shouldn't deify them either.
And their income tax theft isn't legal or decriminalized.
The recycling deposit isn't a bounty. It's intended for the person using the goods. If they choose to forgo it by putting it in a bin, it shouldn't go to some random person digging in the bin, but should go to the waste department, which is expensive enough without people exploiting this incentive.
i can't fathom being this spiteful. are you literally a cartoon super-villain? exploiting incentive? they're digging in the trash. how could you possibly begrudge them such a humble way of life?
Do you think it is good they are digging in the trash? Surely there is a better alternative to this. You may not like the wording but the parent is not wrong.
i've addressed this elsewhere in the thread: of course i don't think it's good but it's not their fault! it's our fault! that's where the parent is wrong because they're not exploiting anything - they're eking out an existence.
"The recycling deposit isn't a bounty. It's intended for the person using the goods. If they choose to forgo it by putting it in a bin, it shouldn't go to some random person digging in the bin, but should go to the waste department, which is expensive enough without people exploiting this incentive."
In San Francisco we have these old ladies who rummage though people's bins looking for redeemable containers. Most are "conscientious" enough to put the rest of the recyclables back in without leaving a mess on the sidewalk, but some are less caring and you wake up having to put things back in the bin. On the other hand I believe rubbish companies consider the practice theft and so they campaign against the practice.
I grew up in Connecticut where we always had redemption value on cans/bottles and so on. The rule was if you sold it you had to take it back. Taking back the cans and bottles was normal for me as a kid, it was how I got change for the vending machines in front of the store.
In CA (in the Bay Area) I am charged redemption value on cans and bottles. I put them in recycling, and guess what, the same truck that picks up my garbage also picks up my recycling... it is all going in the trash.
Recycling is broken, and we need to make more changes to make it effective.
In the Bay Area, you're probably being served by Recology. They have trucks with multiple compartments for recycling, composting, and trash, but they also have pretty advanced sorting capabilities at their sites: https://www.recology.com/environment-innovation/#resource-re...
I don't doubt that recycling needs to be improved in most places, but the San Francisco Bay Area system is among the better ones.
In two counties, the same single compartment truck is picking up both cans (trash+recycling) at the same stop. No amount of sorting is going to help fix that mess.
You’d be surprised. In the last city I lived in in Orange County, the waste system was deliberately designed to have a single residential container and full sorting done at the waste facility by a combination of people and machines. The claim was that it was actually more effective than curbside sorting because the professionals and automation knew how to process recyclables better than the average resident. I don’t know if that is what Recology does in single-truck locations, but it seems likely.
Part of the redemption values is now effectively a tax, because many people who never redeem them. This is fine,
except much of it's being scooped up by people picking through the trash, as a disorganized benefit for the poor, which might work well but isn't designed for that purpose.
Where I used to live in Emeryville, I would get woken up by someone digging in the trash in the morning. Short of wearing earplugs, which are uncomfortable and not recommended for wearing while sleeping, there was nothing I could do about it. It was infuriating.
At one place I worked in San Francisco we had a padlock on our trash can. It was worth the inconvenience of unlocking it and locking it back up when taking the trash out. The waste department had keys that could open it. This was in the mission.
you could pay more in taxes so that these people could have section 8 housing and food stamps so that they don't have to dig in the trash in order to survive.
edit: i see i'm getting downvoted. it boggles the mind. people are starving literally in his driveway (not in another state, not in another country, not abstractly) and he's complaining about the noise of their death rattle. like how do you square that? i'd love someone to actually respond/answer rather than downvote in indignation. are you upset at the politics of the suggestion that the solution to the problem is not getting rid of their sole means to survive but to actually help them? is it divisive because i invoked the hob goblin of hn (higher taxes)? just truly what is the appropriate response here? is it really "fuck em let die so i can sleep blissfully unaware"?
When you send your (surplus) taxes to the city or state (or feds), you don’t get to earmark it.
Also let’s say you could and this person got housed and they also decided they would not rummage thru trash. Someone else will take up the slack and rummage.
For example the city of SF spends inordinate amounts on homelessness but the problem only gets bigger.
When people talk of the military industrial complex, we know what it means. In SF there is a homelessness-industrial complex that exists for its own sake and is better off perpetuating homelessness than solving it.
Don’t believe me? Propose homelessness solutions that cut out these orgs and see how well your ideas are received.
> When you send your (surplus) taxes to the city or state (or feds), you don’t get to earmark it.
I don't know where you're from, but in California, we regularly vote on ballot propositions to levy taxes earmarked for specific purposes. For example, in the most recent election cycle, Proposition C was on the SF ballot, which raised $300 million in taxes to address homelessness. Due to our fondness for direct democracy, any interested citizen can write a ballot proposition for everyone else to vote on. So yes, you certainly can earmark taxes. You can push for propositions to reduce homelessness, and you can vote for them, and encourage your friends and family and coworkers to vote for them.
> For example the city of SF spends inordinate amounts on homelessness but the problem only gets bigger.
At any rate, even if SF were spending an inordinate amount trying to house the homeless, it would only make sense to, given how damn high the rents are.
> Don’t believe me? Propose homelessness solutions that cut out these orgs and see how well your ideas are received.
Yeah, I don't believe you, because the people who get into working with the homeless don't do it because they like money. I'm a software developer. I certainly don't do it because I need the money. It's not even sexy work, as far as non-profits go. Assuming that the same incentives that work on the military apply to do-gooders doing thankless work is just lazy.
There is also the small problem wherein if the org I volunteer with on occasion, Food not Bombs, were cut out, homeless people would literally starve. So yes, I _would_ be very opposed to that, unless the city took it upon itself to feed the homeless instead.
The biggest obstacle to solving homelessness, as with many other problems, is not the people who care about the homeless, but the people who don't: the NIMBYs. The SF NIMBYs recently put $250k and a lawsuit into the effort to defeat the Embarcadero Navigation Center, which has only 200 beds. Thankfully, it has failed, but there are only seven centers, and a homeless population of 7-8k, so it's not going to make much of a dent.
When every attempt to build a good homeless shelter meets this much opposition, it's just deeply wrongheaded, and, dare I say, callous, to blame the people helping a population who so many hate.
> Don’t believe me? Propose homelessness solutions that cut out these orgs and see how well your ideas are received.
Yes, people are often negative towards suggestions that don't use any existing knowledge, experience or infrastructure. To jump from that to "there's a conspiracy to keep this in place!" is ludicrous.
> >When people talk of the military industrial complex, we know what it means. In SF there is a homelessness-industrial complex that exists for its own sake and is better off perpetuating homelessness than solving it
> this is utterly incredible. please do tell which services are rendered to the homeless at exorbitant cost to anyone (e.g. tax payers) such that it merits comparison with defense contractors.
I don't know much about the situation, and do not mean to assert any facts here, only a different interpretation of the grandparent from the one I think you had.
I think mc32 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21889186) was suggesting that the money is funneled to the people allegedly solving homelessness, not to the homeless themselves, and that those solvers have the perverse incentive that they are more interested in the continuing revenue stream than in actually solving the problem. Of course comparisons to the military-industrial complex are hyperbole: such expenditures will fall far short of those spent on defence, as all expenditures in the US do.
I think part of the issue here is that section 8 is rent support payments. It doesn’t pay directly to build housing. California is already a very high tax state, there’s money there. However, because of overly restrictive zoning and the ability of neighbors to block construction, that kind of housing can’t get built.
that's fine. i'll gladly admit that i'm not a welfare economist and that my shoot from the hip solution isn't necessarily the correct one. but at least the thing i'm expressing is "how can we help them" instead of "how can we make life even more difficult for them". this isn't to say i'm proud of myself or something - i'm just sincerely flabbergasted at expressing the latter opinion.
You're blaming a random stranger on the internet for taxation and benefits policies which you know they don't control. They might even agree with you.
Every time homelessness comes up on hacker news there are people who leap on posts they think don't show enough sympathy. This behavior never seems helpful.
Sure, but I suspect a non-antagonistic comment suggesting that everyone could do there part wouldn't have received the downvotes they demanded an explanation for.
i'm not blaming them for the homelessness - i'm blaming them for casting the issue as the homeless antagonizing the well-heeled rather than as society failing the homeless.
>leap on posts they think don't show enough sympathy
i do not understand what the issue with that response is. we should shun the unempathetic.
What about meeting people lacking empathy where they are at, and trying to connect with them? Sometimes a perceived lack of empathy has its roots in a lack of human connection.
i have meditated long and hard on this. when i was younger i gave people the benefit of the doubt - if you comfort and reassure them they make themselves vulnerable to you and become empathetic. after decades of experience i can safely say that many many people will never overcome whatever barriers they have to empathy (cowardice, jealousy, etc) and moreover i'm not jesus - i'm not responsible for everyone. given that i'm finite (time and energy) priority goes to those that are disempowered rather than those that have power and can't see their way to using it benevolently.
I also downvoted this, well after your comment, because the comment directs someone to go out and do something that they cannot actually do (i.e. rewrite politics), because the political parties in power in California are perfectly happy to spend money on these matters already, but mostly because it is nontrivially likely that someone rifling through trash at such hours is a homeless person who has bigger problems than the availability of housing vouchers, so the specific policy perspectives offered will have only a marginal effect.
This makes a tremendous mess, and the city recycling trucks often won't pick up the the bags once they have been shredded, and it creates litter up and down the street -- it probably costs 5x as much to clean up after the homeless as they get off of the bottle deposits, and this is after they've already performed the labor of separating the solid waste stream.