If no housing is built that’s good for landlords and property owners as rents and property prices rise. If no (affordable) housing is built in an area with strong economic growth that’s good for fundraising of some charities as the problem gets worse.
No economic incentive, more of a sense of responsibility to society and some nationalism. look at the UAE where the incentive is more political or for prestige.
Wait how is raising housing prices responsible for society or nationalistic? Shafting the youth, turning them against the system and reducing their economic output, seems the opposite.
Across the entire country, Finland had 3x fewer homeless people at its worst than San Francisco the city does. The problem is of such different magnitudes that it's unlikely Finland has much to teach.
And Finland is a country so there are less regional differences in policymaking. And Finland doesn't have balkanized healthcare systems. And Finland doesn't have suburban land use that sets a high minimum cost to participating in society. And Finland doesn't have open borders with Republican states which openly advertise that they bus indigent migrants with no work permits to sanctuary cities.
Science works best when you have controls that let you measure the consequences of changes precisely. Saying that results from a Nordic social democracy probably don't apply to a city with no administrative capacity and machine politics is not controversial. It's the null hypothesis!
> Republican states which openly advertise that they bus indigent migrants with no work permits to sanctuary cities.
Oh, those stupid Republicans! I can't believe they would ever send illegal immigrants that voluntarily want to go to a sanctuary city that has been proclaiming themselves as a safe harbor for criminals for over a decade, to said sanctuary city! Oh, the horror and atrocity!
The only reason the border is wide open is because we don't have sufficient border walls and border enforcement, all of which sanctuary city democrats have opposed and voted against.
If your going to go political, you probably should've just pointed to the open border problem, not target Republicans. But it's obvious whose causing an open border right now.
> The only reason the border is wide open is because we don't have sufficient border walls and border enforcement,
The bottleneck at the border is not physically policing the border, but the fact that migrants have learned to work the legal system by filing asylum requests. So the solution is legal reform, not building more walls. The 2023 border reform bill would have enforced a mandatory cap on the number of asylum requests processed (not just granted, but processed at all). Any migrant asking for asylum after that cap would have been turned away immediately.
> But it's obvious whose causing an open border right now.
I wouldn't say it's clear at all. It's true that the Democrats have historically turned a blind eye to the border. But over the past 12 months: First the GOP leadership said they wouldn't pass border reform unless it was bundled with Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan funding, then said they wouldn't pass border reform until it was unbundled, then they brought the Ukraine/Israel/Taiwan funding back to the floor but not the unbundled border reform bill. For the first time in a generation, there were enough Democratic votes to pass significant border reform, and the GOP votes simultaneously vanished into thin air.
The vast majority of illegal immigration happens through legal ports of entry. Usually individuals just over stay a tourist visa.
Republicans have rejected the recent bipartisan board deal that would fund hundreds of new boarder patrol agents, and immigration ALJs to expand enforcement and processing capacity at the boarder. All because daddy Trump wants there to be a border crisis because it's a good election issue for him to run on.
Republicans don't care about governing, they just care about winning.
I made no value judgment about Republicans. That was your projection. The primary cause of border issues is dysfunction in the Senate that prevents asylum laws from being improved.
No I pointed out a list of ways Finland was different from San Francisco so we should not naively assume data from there should generalize. It’s not cherry picked since it was one in a long list of ways the two are different.
Street homelessness in San Francisco has little to do with immigration, and family homelessness has little to do with illegal immigration (families from South America are largely claiming asylum through the legal process).
HN is not the right forum for sports-team red vs blue politics, and that kind of mentality is not good for our nation as a whole. We are all one nation.
Then the OP shouldn't blame the issues sanctuary cities face on Republican states. If illegal immigration is a problem for sanctuary cities, then that is what should be said.
It's not red vs blue to point out an attempt to shift blame on Republican governors.
I was not assigning blame. I was making a factual statement that San Francisco’s recent increase is family homelessness is largely due to bussing policies of Republican run border states. Asylum applicants are in the United States legally while their claims are processed, so the status of sanctuary city has nothing to do with the treatment of asylum applicants. Non-sanctuary cities would treat these applicants in the same way.
Practically, to earn income in most parts of America, you need to own a car and pay rent on a single family home. That is a $800-$1000 additional expense versus living in a micro-studio and taking transit to work.
For someone on the margins, that is a huge and often insurmountable price of entry. Many can make do by, e.g., being housemates in a larger home to reduce the minimum expense. Folks on the margins are often not able to find others willing to live with them.
So... Finland, exactly, right? I assume that you already know that Finland is huge but only has a population of ~5.5M. Except for central Helsinki, the entire country is suburban or rural. I'll offer a counterpoint that people rarely consider: Most of the populated land in Japan in rural. Many people who live more than 50km from a major city drive. Almost all people who live 100km from a major city have 2x cars in their home. This shocks many people. Please stop assuming that the US is special or amazing. It has pockets of very dense cities and the rest is mostly suburban or rural... like other highly advanced countries in Europe or East Asia.
Most people in advanced countries are rich and can choose expensive lifestyles, but that has little to do with the options afforded to those who aren’t.
If you're going to take the moral stand against the way border states handle their illegal migrants publicly and derisively while simultaneously declaring yourself as a safe haven for those migrants, you probably shouldn't be surprised when those states call your bluff.
That does not really describe what’s happening. The fix for asylum laws being abused is legislative, and in the last year fixes have been scuttled by Republican legislators.
Sanctuary city laws are pretty reasonable policy statements about when a city cooperates in deporting illegal immigrants who may otherwise be law abiding. This makes perfect sense as a policy when you operate in an immigration regime that makes legal immigration infeasible for all kinds of necessary labor, from farm workers to domestic help and even high skilled IT.
If Texas wanted to call California’s bluff on housing policy, it would also reject the middle and high income households moving to the Triangle from high housing cost California suburbs. But it’s not principled when it comes to that — their money is welcomed! Heck, even the Florida model where they check if businesses are indeed employing legal workers in labor intensive industries like construction would be a more faithful enactment of law and order values with respect to immigration. Anything short of that is its own form of sheltering.
I'm not really making a policy criticism of any of it really. I'm just saying, if you're going to publicly antagonize someone about they way they do something and imply your way is the enlightened way to score political points, don't be surprised when those people find a way to call your bluff, publicly.
Trucking migrants to sancutary cities has changed people's minds.
No, forcefully moving people around has not changed any minds and
> publicly antagonize someone about they way they do something and imply your way is the enlightened way to score political points, don't be surprised when those people find a way to call your bluff
Not sure how you frame a political stunt as a moral comeuppance.
> No, forcefully moving people around has not changed any minds
I disagree. I've seen poling and heard numerous stories of citizens of sanctuary cites that were not border cites and have a very negligible issue with illegal migration suddenly having to deal with it first that shows that trucking migrants has moved the needle.
> Not sure how you frame a political stunt as a moral comeuppance.
Dozens of stories in whatever news media you consume has nothing to do with whether there are serious policy conversations about revisiting sanctuary city laws in those cities.
"Changing minds" is what I said, not changing policy.
> Q. 26 Do you think New Yorkers should accept new migrants and work to assimilate them into New York, or New Yorkers have
already done enough for new migrants and should now work to slow the flow of migrants to New York? (Order of choices was
rotated.)
> DATE | ACCEPT/ASSIMILATE | SLOW THE FLOW | DON’T KNOW/NO OPINION
> Dozens of stories in whatever news media you consume has nothing to do with whether there are serious policy conversations about revisiting sanctuary city laws in those cities.
Ha, is AP news up to your standards[1]? How about a direct quote from the Mayor of New York City?
> Citing his “fundamental disagreement” with those laws, [Mayor] Adams, a Democrat, said the city’s police department should be free to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when a person is suspected of a serious crime, such as robbery or gang activity.
You can dislike it all you want but bussing immigrants has had a major effect on people's opinions in the sanctuary cities they are bussed to.
That was not the logic of my comment, and it seems like you didn't try very hard to consider what I meant. For example: the "interesting and thoughtful" article linked describes Finland's "Housing First" model adopted in 2008. Guess what: Housing First was first introduced as a policy idea in San Francisco in 1994, adopted as de facto city policy about ten years after that, and set as statewide policy in California ten years later. Ten years later, the problem is worse than ever!
Perhaps Finland and California are different enough that looking to Finland as a policy playground is a waste of time. This isn't physics; it's political economy.
Adopting policies is one thing, but is SF actually giving housing first to the homeless? Because my rough understanding is that the answer to that is "no".
Depends what you mean. All the subsidized housing available is operated under the housing first model with no sobriety requirement. Is there sufficient housing on offer? Clearly not. But SF expanded subsidized housing inventory substantially during the pandemic and has more such inventory than basically any other west coast city.
For political reasons having to do with the NPIC, the city does not invest much in shelter beds. So it’s a $750k-$1m apartment or bust.
There was no bad faith reasoning in my original comment. I, pretty evidently, understand the history of Housing First better than you do and am still convinced policy outcomes in Finland aren't very informative to San Francisco because the societies and challenges are very different.
Us is deeply anti social at the heart. The original reason it got away with it was the American dream aka upward mobility. That is dead for two generations now, and it has developed a corresponding "anti-system" movement the society refused to acknowledge and deal with beyond declaring them "deplorables". The day the leader dies, such movements are up for grabs and can spin on the proverbial ideological dime. Maga will go sendero, but there was just nothing to be done.
I don't really buy this doomerism. The USA passed the biggest COVID safety net, in absolute and relative terms. It's still one of the best countries to get ahead. Most of its problems are not framed through grand narratives about decline. They're more pedestrian issues related to mechanisms like common law, a dysfunctional Senate and two party system, and replacement of state capacity with nonprofits (as this article poorly discusses).
California also gets at least one countries worth of homeless shipped to it BECAUSE of the resources it provides (And political spite). This is the bad Nash Equilibrium in action, being punished for improving the situation.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/how-finland-solved-ho...