Crews clear encampment, relocate homeless living on Apple land

Posted:
in General Discussion
A homeless encampment on 55 acres of Apple's land is now being cleared, with an estimated 60 people relocated at the company's expense.

San Jose Encampment
San Jose Encampment


The growing homeless community that had been living on a tract of Apple's land is being cleared. Crews are removing debris, closing the site, and relocating people.

It comes after Apple announced it would contribute millions of dollars from its $2.5 billion California housing project. In partnership with non-profit organization HomeFirst, the planned clearing is intended to see homeless people relocated, or rehoused.

According to CBS News, flyers were posted at the site saying that closure would begin at 7 a.m. local time on September 2. People living in the encampment were offered three different options for interim housing, each of which would be paid for by Apple for the next nine months.

Residents could choose from a motel room, a bed in an emergency shelter, or what CBS News describes as a safe parking space. Alongside the costs of each option, Apple is also covering the cost of case management for 12 months.

Not all residents have accepted the offers, however. Robert Carlson, who was living in a collection of large vehicles that included an RV, has reportedly elected to move away on his own.

"It's all part of life, ain't it? Trials and tribulations, man," Carlson told CBS News. "Well, we were all a big family here. We were a big family. I miss everybody already."

One person who has accepted a motel room says that Apple and HomeFirst may mean that her story "might have a happy ending."

"They're gonna help me get teeth. Because I don't have any, you know?" she said. "It's easier to get a job when you have teeth."

HomeFirst's CEO, Andrea Urton, said that Apple had been "generous," and that the intervention of corporations like this is now necessary.

"The city and county are doing everything they feasibly can right now, and have been for the past two years," she said. "They're under-resourced and they're tired, just like we all are."

"So by having large companies step in and provide the resources that nonprofits need to be part of the solution, we can actually effectively end homelessness together," said Urton.

The homeless community on Apple's land on the corner of North First Street and Component Drive in North San Jose, had grown because of other clearing efforts. San Jose had undertaken what it described as an "enhanced cleanup" of neighboring areas.

As the encampment population varied from 35 to 70 people, residents lived in a mixture of mobile homes and wooden structures. A recent fire on the encampment reportedly destroyed an RV, and burnt five acres of vegetation.

A new 7-foot black metal fence is being constructed around part of the property. It is guarded by an unknown number of Apple's private security staff.

Apple says that it intends to build low-cost housing on the land.

Read on AppleInsider

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 20
    That land is their home pod.
  • Reply 2 of 20
    Welcome to the new 'Suburbia.'
  • Reply 3 of 20
    The richest nation with a large  homeless citizens. The highest tax State with the highest homeless residents. WHY, HOW COME? 
  • Reply 4 of 20
    AppleZuluAppleZulu Posts: 1,989member
    Kuyangkoh said:
    The richest nation with a large  homeless citizens. The highest tax State with the highest homeless residents. WHY, HOW COME? 
    1) Minimum wage laws have not kept up with the minimum costs for people to house themselves. If a person working full time can't afford housing, they will either be homeless or be supported by public and private subsidy. The cheapest way to address that would be to require employers to pay a minimum wage tied to actual cost of living. Yes, that would make your hamburger more expensive, but paying the actual cost to make the hamburger so that the employee can be paid enough to pay their rent is far cheaper than paying an artificially low price for the hamburger plus paying taxes and charities to manage programs to help impoverished people obtain housing, and then pay more taxes and charitable donations to try to deal with people in crisis because they're homeless, can't afford housing and can't get a job because they're homeless. Ironically, a real minimum wage is the most conservative, least government interventionist way to simply put up a guardrail to make capitalism actually work, but conservatives are the ones who will fight it the hardest, thus necessitating less efficient, more government-oriented responses.

    2) Insufficient public resourcing for healthcare, particularly behavioral healthcare. Everyone needs access to both physical and behavioral healthcare. Because most people value the lives of their loved ones and themselves at infinity, healthcare is one thing that does not and will not respond to supply-and-demand economics. Our patchwork system of private insurance and healthcare provision that pretends that it will respond to normal economics simply creates a system that is effective at siphoning off huge amounts of money (because the demand side always pushes toward infinity), but terrible at supplying the full panoply of healthcare to those who need it when they need it. Add to that the irrational stigma around needing and seeking mental health care, plus an opiate crisis generated by sociopathic opportunists, and you have a real problem with homelessness.
    elijahgauxiomuthuk_vanalingamviclauyycFileMakerFellerjcs2305
  • Reply 5 of 20
    When in California on holidays (vacation as Americans would say) I was shocked by the number of homeless and frankly grossly mentally unwell people on the streets. Taxes are very low in the US. Maybe a rethink is needed. It broke my heart to see a young man at San Jose train station who was tortured by his obviously untreated psychosis. Where were the outreach and homeless teams? People just accepted this mans suffering without blinking an eye
  • Reply 6 of 20
    AppleZuluAppleZulu Posts: 1,989member
    123Go said:
    When in California on holidays (vacation as Americans would say) I was shocked by the number of homeless and frankly grossly mentally unwell people on the streets. Taxes are very low in the US. Maybe a rethink is needed. It broke my heart to see a young man at San Jose train station who was tortured by his obviously untreated psychosis. Where were the outreach and homeless teams? People just accepted this mans suffering without blinking an eye
    Overworked and underpaid, tasked with handling impossible problems that should have been addressed way upstream. These things will only get fixed by us as a civilization taking responsibility for things and not letting them get out of hand in the first place. We're now at 40+ years of a failed trickle-down economic theology that says it's a cost savings to take away resources for things like mental health care that could have helped the guy in San Jose before he ever would have ended up at that train station. That supposed cost savings ends up adding huge expense to cash-strapped local communities that then get blamed for the problem because there is nowhere else left to pass the buck.

    Imagine a smartphone company that saves money by slashing budgets for R&D and factory production lines, resulting in shoddy, defective products coming off the line. The executive suite pockets the "savings," while retail staff are issued screwdrivers and duct tape to respond to angry consumers coming back to the store with broken phones. Ordering extra duct tape isn't going to fix that problem.
    edited September 2021 muthuk_vanalingamlibertykrsviclauyycjcs2305
  • Reply 7 of 20
    BeatsBeats Posts: 3,073member
    “Greedy Apple” at it again!!

    I hope these people actually do good with the help Apple gives them. The lady getting her teeth seems to be legit but most homeless people are hardcore drug addicts. Everyone seems to think they’re these good people who can’t get jobs.

    123Go said:
    When in California on holidays (vacation as Americans would say) I was shocked by the number of homeless and frankly grossly mentally unwell people on the streets. Taxes are very low in the US. Maybe a rethink is needed. It broke my heart to see a young man at San Jose train station who was tortured by his obviously untreated psychosis. Where were the outreach and homeless teams? People just accepted this mans suffering without blinking an eye

    Why do people assume homeless people are these nice, humble people who just can’t get a break. Not true.

    Homeless people get A TON of help in the U.S. most are homeless because hey choose to be. Right now they’re getting 400+ dollars a month (!!!)in food stamps and they sell them! I’ve seen a homeless man who pretends to be deaf for money, make $50 in 5 minutes pan handling and preying on the sympathy of others. I’m one of the only people in the neighborhood who knows he isn’t deaf and mute. He literally lives that way for money but he can hear and talk normally. He used to buy drugs from someone I know and boy did he talk and listen then with all the money he panhandled.
    viclauyycJSR_FDED
  • Reply 8 of 20
    Kuyangkoh said:
    The richest nation with a large  homeless citizens. The highest tax State with the highest homeless residents. WHY, HOW COME? 
    Cuba is one of the poorest countries in the world and it has 0.00% homeless. I supposed you want to live in Cuba or in a dictatorship where homelessness is prohibited by law. And I suppose you hate to live in a free country where homelessness is legally permitted.

  • Reply 9 of 20
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    Kuyangkoh said:
    The richest nation with a large  homeless citizens. The highest tax State with the highest homeless residents. WHY, HOW COME? 
    Cuba is one of the poorest countries in the world and it has 0.00% homeless. I supposed you want to live in Cuba or in a dictatorship where homelessness is prohibited by law. And I suppose you hate to live in a free country where homelessness is legally permitted.
    :smiley:  The fuck is this nonsense?

    Cuba is certainly not "one of the poorest countries in the world", it's mid-table at worst, and absolute poverty is not-existent because of social programs.  Of all the places to be poor in the world, Cuba is one of the best options.

    And there is no dichotomy here.  There is no enforced choice between California and Cuba.  Cuba is not relevant to an interest in why California has such a big homelessness problem.
    muthuk_vanalingamFileMakerFellermariowincojony0
  • Reply 10 of 20
    dewmedewme Posts: 5,329member
    123Go said:
    When in California on holidays (vacation as Americans would say) I was shocked by the number of homeless and frankly grossly mentally unwell people on the streets. Taxes are very low in the US. Maybe a rethink is needed. It broke my heart to see a young man at San Jose train station who was tortured by his obviously untreated psychosis. Where were the outreach and homeless teams? People just accepted this mans suffering without blinking an eye

    I know it doesn't provide an ounce of rationale, but I've seen similar conditions in other parts of the world including Germany, China, and Canada. The last time I was in Montreal my wife and I somehow ended up on the "other end" of Sainte-Catherine Street, the side where the Apple Store and other high end retail stores are not located. It was around 10:00 am in the morning on a beautiful summer day. There were a handful of people (male and female) passed out drunk, some laying next to pools of their own vomit, laid out on the sidewalk. My wife was beside herself and visibly shaken because there were cops right there, walking around like this was all just part of the scenery. We spoke with a nearby cop, like "You know, that person looks like he/she might need help" which was met with a shrug.

    I experienced similar things in Frankfurt, Germany next to the main rail station, including younger teens who seemed to hang out around the station drinking all day and all night. When I left my hotel in the morning in Frankfurt there was a long queue formed up next to the hotel with addicts lining up to get their methadone treatments. I didn't see obvious signs of homelessness where I traveled in China, but I did experience situations in China where mothers would send their young children out after tourists to beg for money, so you'd be set upon by a swarm of little kids begging for money while walking down the street, but in my case, only when you were not accompanied by a Chinese colleague. Experienced very similar panhandling/begging in Naples, Marseilles, and other port cities in Europe, and when venturing inside the "tourist veneer" in a number of Caribbean countries - which I had to do (with help of course) to retrieve some wayward sailors when on Shore Patrol.  

    Homelessness is a global problem, but yeah, it's very noticeable in a lot of larger US cities, especially ones with survivable weather. A lot of public mental health facilities have been closed down for decades but the number of people requiring mental health services has probably stayed the same or perhaps increased. Increasing taxes won't fix the problem when there is no will to fix the problem, or as long as it remains someone else's problem to fix.
    edited September 2021 viclauyycFileMakerFeller
  • Reply 11 of 20
    chadbagchadbag Posts: 1,999member
    Homelessness in the US has a history.  At least with regards to the ones with mental illness.   Back in the 80s there were lawsuits that basically forced the mental illness hospitals to release all their patients as the judges said people couldn’t be held and treated without their consent (and being mentally ill they couldn’t easily give consent).  So the streets were flooded with folks who needed mental illness treatment and couldn’t be compelled to get it.  Been an issue ever since. (I recognize not all homeless fall into this category). 

    Also, to the comment about minimum wage.  Changing the minimum wage to force payment of so-called living wages wouldn’t fix the problem at all.  That is not how the economy works.  That just drives up inflation as prices are adjusted to soak up the extra money being paid out.   Not all jobs are meant to slow someone to support themselves independently.  Some are meant for first time job seekers like teenagers to gain work experience.  Or retired people to fill their days and allow socialization (I did not say al retired people who work dal into that category).  You’d be far better off helping people gain skills that qualify them for higher paying jobs than to force business to artificially raise wages above what the economic activity they are supporting warrants. 
    JSR_FDEDJMStearnsX2
  • Reply 12 of 20
    Beats said:
    “Greedy Apple” at it again!!

    I hope these people actually do good with the help Apple gives them. The lady getting her teeth seems to be legit but most homeless people are hardcore drug addicts. Everyone seems to think they’re these good people who can’t get jobs.

    123Go said:
    When in California on holidays (vacation as Americans would say) I was shocked by the number of homeless and frankly grossly mentally unwell people on the streets. Taxes are very low in the US. Maybe a rethink is needed. It broke my heart to see a young man at San Jose train station who was tortured by his obviously untreated psychosis. Where were the outreach and homeless teams? People just accepted this mans suffering without blinking an eye

    Why do people assume homeless people are these nice, humble people who just can’t get a break. Not true.

    Homeless people get A TON of help in the U.S. most are homeless because hey choose to be. Right now they’re getting 400+ dollars a month (!!!)in food stamps and they sell them! I’ve seen a homeless man who pretends to be deaf for money, make $50 in 5 minutes pan handling and preying on the sympathy of others. I’m one of the only people in the neighborhood who knows he isn’t deaf and mute. He literally lives that way for money but he can hear and talk normally. He used to buy drugs from someone I know and boy did he talk and listen then with all the money he panhandled.
    Got it - so they're all faking it.    
  • Reply 13 of 20
    AppleZulu said:
    Kuyangkoh said:
    The richest nation with a large  homeless citizens. The highest tax State with the highest homeless residents. WHY, HOW COME? 
    1) Minimum wage laws have not kept up with the minimum costs for people to house themselves. If a person working full time can't afford housing, they will either be homeless or be supported by public and private subsidy. The cheapest way to address that would be to require employers to pay a minimum wage tied to actual cost of living. Yes, that would make your hamburger more expensive, but paying the actual cost to make the hamburger so that the employee can be paid enough to pay their rent is far cheaper than paying an artificially low price for the hamburger plus paying taxes and charities to manage programs to help impoverished people obtain housing, and then pay more taxes and charitable donations to try to deal with people in crisis because they're homeless, can't afford housing and can't get a job because they're homeless. Ironically, a real minimum wage is the most conservative, least government interventionist way to simply put up a guardrail to make capitalism actually work, but conservatives are the ones who will fight it the hardest, thus necessitating less efficient, more government-oriented responses.

    2) Insufficient public resourcing for healthcare, particularly behavioral healthcare. Everyone needs access to both physical and behavioral healthcare. Because most people value the lives of their loved ones and themselves at infinity, healthcare is one thing that does not and will not respond to supply-and-demand economics. Our patchwork system of private insurance and healthcare provision that pretends that it will respond to normal economics simply creates a system that is effective at siphoning off huge amounts of money (because the demand side always pushes toward infinity), but terrible at supplying the full panoply of healthcare to those who need it when they need it. Add to that the irrational stigma around needing and seeking mental health care, plus an opiate crisis generated by sociopathic opportunists, and you have a real problem with homelessness.
    3) Bad public policy decisions made by the political ruling class especially in CA that impact supply/demand economics by making affordable housing more expensive per square foot compared to other states because of mandated superfluous requirements in the building code by city and state officials - thus there is a minimum floor pricing for per sq/ft construction that is much more expensive than it needs to be, as well as limiting expansion on available land for new construction, reasoning for or high density housing - lets also not forget NIMBY influences for the high density housing and lastly, lets also lump in the impact of mandates for solar and elimination of natural gas in new construction - all laudable from an environmental standpoint, but all having the net impact of near term cost increases, shall we talk about gasoline prices next and the taxes levied in CA on those… there is a long laundry list we could go through under point three. A lot of this is driven by policy decisions at city and state level. This is seldom spoken about - as it is easier to put the blame on other topics and deflect it away from the politicians.
  • Reply 14 of 20
    AppleZuluAppleZulu Posts: 1,989member
    Beats said:
    “Greedy Apple” at it again!!

    I hope these people actually do good with the help Apple gives them. The lady getting her teeth seems to be legit but most homeless people are hardcore drug addicts. Everyone seems to think they’re these good people who can’t get jobs.

    123Go said:
    When in California on holidays (vacation as Americans would say) I was shocked by the number of homeless and frankly grossly mentally unwell people on the streets. Taxes are very low in the US. Maybe a rethink is needed. It broke my heart to see a young man at San Jose train station who was tortured by his obviously untreated psychosis. Where were the outreach and homeless teams? People just accepted this mans suffering without blinking an eye

    Why do people assume homeless people are these nice, humble people who just can’t get a break. Not true.

    Homeless people get A TON of help in the U.S. most are homeless because hey choose to be. Right now they’re getting 400+ dollars a month (!!!)in food stamps and they sell them! I’ve seen a homeless man who pretends to be deaf for money, make $50 in 5 minutes pan handling and preying on the sympathy of others. I’m one of the only people in the neighborhood who knows he isn’t deaf and mute. He literally lives that way for money but he can hear and talk normally. He used to buy drugs from someone I know and boy did he talk and listen then with all the money he panhandled.
    People who are homeless cover the gamut just like any other part of the population. There are decent people and there are jerks. Assuming they're all one or the other isn't helpful. Drug addiction, particularly with opiates, is a significant causative factor. Very few of those people took their first Oxycontin and thought, "man, I want to go live under a bridge and shoot up on heroin with filthy needles." So no, very few people "choose" to be homeless. That just defies logic. Some made bad life choices from the start and ended up there. Some can't earn enough wages to pay for housing where they are. Some are mentally ill, and can't get treatment, or their mental illness causes them to refuse treatment.

    Others sought care for an injury and were prescribed a highly addictive drug created by unscrupulous companies that sold those drugs while affirmatively claiming that they were not addictive. Read up on the current Purdue Pharma case for reference. Not a reader? John Oliver offers a flippant but informative primer. Also, as a counter to your anecdote about a homeless (presumed; many panhandlers are not homeless, they're just grifters) guy who lies to get money, Mr. Oliver offers some great examples of rich pharmaceutical execs who do the same thing. I think the rich pharmaceutical execs told bigger lies, got a lot more money, and did infinitely more damage to the country than your crafty panhandler guy. Is he a jerk? Probably, but I think the Sackler family are infinitely bigger jerks.
    JSR_FDEDFileMakerFeller
  • Reply 15 of 20
    maestro64maestro64 Posts: 5,043member
    AppleZulu said:
    Kuyangkoh said:
    The richest nation with a large  homeless citizens. The highest tax State with the highest homeless residents. WHY, HOW COME? 
    1) Minimum wage laws have not kept up with the minimum costs for people to house themselves. If a person working full time can't afford housing, they will either be homeless or be supported by public and private subsidy. The cheapest way to address that would be to require employers to pay a minimum wage tied to actual cost of living. Yes, that would make your hamburger more expensive, but paying the actual cost to make the hamburger so that the employee can be paid enough to pay their rent is far cheaper than paying an artificially low price for the hamburger plus paying taxes and charities to manage programs to help impoverished people obtain housing, and then pay more taxes and charitable donations to try to deal with people in crisis because they're homeless, can't afford housing and can't get a job because they're homeless. Ironically, a real minimum wage is the most conservative, least government interventionist way to simply put up a guardrail to make capitalism actually work, but conservatives are the ones who will fight it the hardest, thus necessitating less efficient, more government-oriented responses.

    2) Insufficient public resourcing for healthcare, particularly behavioral healthcare. Everyone needs access to both physical and behavioral healthcare. Because most people value the lives of their loved ones and themselves at infinity, healthcare is one thing that does not and will not respond to supply-and-demand economics. Our patchwork system of private insurance and healthcare provision that pretends that it will respond to normal economics simply creates a system that is effective at siphoning off huge amounts of money (because the demand side always pushes toward infinity), but terrible at supplying the full panoply of healthcare to those who need it when they need it. Add to that the irrational stigma around needing and seeking mental health care, plus an opiate crisis generated by sociopathic opportunists, and you have a real problem with homelessness.
    Minimum wage is currently not intended for someone to buy a home or pay monthly rent. A Minimum wage job by definition is for people who live in a household which has other sources of incoming, most of the people being paid minimum wage are kids, if you are working a minimum wage job and not a kid living under your parent roof you need to ask yourself what you are doing wrong. There are plenty of jobs out there that pay a lot more than minimum wage but those jobs required you to actually work hard. 

    Constructions pay a good wages, the trucking industry has been offer people starting wages of $55k a year (no experience required and they provide training) and this is for a driver job which is local and home every night. If you willing to drive cross country those drivers are making $80K to $100K, There has been a shortage of driver for the last 10 yrs so this is not a new thing. 

    Even as a kid when minimum was as $2.90 I never work a minimum wage job I always was able to find jobs which paid more. I think the lowest pay at got at the time was $7. Those were not easy jobs, work at a car dealership prepping new cars, work in a lumber yard loading contractors trucks, working on golf course taking care of greens and fairways. These kinds of jobs are still available today paying better then minimum wage. Every place where local governments increase minimum wage they lost jobs, companies found ways to do more with less labor. McDonald one of the largest employee of minimum wage employees, is finding ways to eliminate those jobs they are looking at ordering kiosks so they do not have to hire someone to take your order.

    The reason you have people out on the street who have mental health issue is due to the fact they closed all the facilities who use to treat these people. The same group of people who said it was cruel to put these people in facility and demand they be closed and they should be allowed to be free to do what they want, they are the same group now complaining there are not enough resources. Look this up, back in the 60's and 70's the government closed the treatment facility an opted for out placement treatment because the so called experts said patients would seek out the treatment can come in as needed once they started to feel better. Well that experience failed.

    As person who lived in the Silicon Valley and visited SF all the time, this problem is not new, back in the 80's you would go SF and see entire families huddled in doorways of businesses this was before they set up the tent cities in city parks in the 90's. This was a shock to see coming from the east coast which most homeless people you saw where single men and a few women. SF government promise to fix this, here we are 30 years later and the situation is far worse. Back then the idea was to move people to places where they could afford to live. Believe it or not people in government argue it was unfair and inhuman to move people to places where they could afford to live. Their solution was to provide people all kinds of freebees which is now causing people to moving from other states to be homeless in Calif. Most of the people on the streets in CA are not even originally from CA. In Calf if you are not making $100K and want to live in SF or Silicon Valley you could be homeless. There are people making $50K to $60K living in their cars.  

    I am curious how Apple is removing people since the court held that you can not remove homeless peoples property, this is specific to public land, however, it is being used on private land as well like people using parking lots to sleep in their cars.

    Then you have this case. The government made mess of the situation and realized it got so bad they now want to try and fix it and the court are saying no you can't. Becuase you have lawyer arguing people and live anywhere they like if they do not have shelter.

    https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-16/homeless-boise-ruling-case-supreme-court
    edited September 2021 JMStearnsX2JSR_FDED
  • Reply 16 of 20
    JWSCJWSC Posts: 1,203member
    AppleZulu said:
    Kuyangkoh said:
    The richest nation with a large  homeless citizens. The highest tax State with the highest homeless residents. WHY, HOW COME? 
    1) Minimum wage laws …
    Minimum wage has NOTHING to do with this problem.  Homelessness is driven by drug addiction and mental illness.  The virtual decriminalization of open air drug markets in what were once public spaces has given rise to criminal violence that threatens everyone.  This is one of the primary reasons Gavin Newsom is under recall threat.

    I’m glad to see that Apple has generously agreed to cover the costs of case management.  I’m not sure what that involves. But I would hope mental health services, counseling and drug treatment plans are core to this effort.
    edited September 2021
  • Reply 17 of 20
    chadbag said:
    Homelessness in the US has a history.  At least with regards to the ones with mental illness.   Back in the 80s there were lawsuits that basically forced the mental illness hospitals to release all their patients as the judges said people couldn’t be held and treated without their consent (and being mentally ill they couldn’t easily give consent).  So the streets were flooded with folks who needed mental illness treatment and couldn’t be compelled to get it.  Been an issue ever since. (I recognize not all homeless fall into this category). 

    Also, to the comment about minimum wage.  Changing the minimum wage to force payment of so-called living wages wouldn’t fix the problem at all.  That is not how the economy works.  That just drives up inflation as prices are adjusted to soak up the extra money being paid out.   Not all jobs are meant to slow someone to support themselves independently.  Some are meant for first time job seekers like teenagers to gain work experience.  Or retired people to fill their days and allow socialization (I did not say al retired people who work dal into that category).  You’d be far better off helping people gain skills that qualify them for higher paying jobs than to force business to artificially raise wages above what the economic activity they are supporting warrants. 
    This
  • Reply 18 of 20
    chadbag said:
    Homelessness in the US has a history.  At least with regards to the ones with mental illness.   Back in the 80s there were lawsuits that basically forced the mental illness hospitals to release all their patients as the judges said people couldn’t be held and treated without their consent (and being mentally ill they couldn’t easily give consent).  So the streets were flooded with folks who needed mental illness treatment and couldn’t be compelled to get it.  Been an issue ever since. (I recognize not all homeless fall into this category). 

    Also, to the comment about minimum wage.  Changing the minimum wage to force payment of so-called living wages wouldn’t fix the problem at all.  That is not how the economy works.  That just drives up inflation as prices are adjusted to soak up the extra money being paid out.   Not all jobs are meant to slow someone to support themselves independently.  Some are meant for first time job seekers like teenagers to gain work experience.  Or retired people to fill their days and allow socialization (I did not say al retired people who work dal into that category).  You’d be far better off helping people gain skills that qualify them for higher paying jobs than to force business to artificially raise wages above what the economic activity they are supporting warrants. 
    This
    If you thought about it for a minute, you would realize how ridiculous it would have ever been to create a federal minimum wage to protect the earning power of teenagers working summer jobs. That's just daft, and it never happened. Minimum wage was created to be a living wage and in those early days, we're talking about a single wage earner supporting a family. This myth of teenage workers came later, as political cover to leave minimum wages so low as to be irrelevant. Most people working minimum wage jobs are not kids. They're adults, and because everywhere they turn, the competing jobs they can get also pay the same lousy wage, they have no choice. The extended unemployment insurance during the pandemic has proven this. Given an option of not working to only earn sub-poverty pay, many people have held out, and (surprise!) wages for those jobs have gone up. Without an increase in the federal minimum wage, those wage increases will only be temporary.

    If I was starting a business and my business plan required me to pay below cost for raw materials, a bank would never issue a loan to get me started. That's a stupid business plan. Yet, if I have a business plan that requires me to pay my front-line employees less than it costs them to live another day to come to work, that's considered brilliant. The bank will write a loan for that! Even better, I'm doing that and siphoning enough off the top to pay myself enough to get a nice vacation home with a boat. Not to worry. My front-line workers earn so little, they qualify for rent subsidies and food stamps! You as a taxpayer are, of course, going to be mad that you're paying taxes to subsidize those lazy workers who can't pay their own way. Here's the thing. You're not subsidizing them, you're subsidizing me! I have externalized my costs and internalized my profits! If you come out to the beach, I'll wave at you from my boat. No, wait. You don't have access to my beach.

    As I wrote before, it would be economically more efficient if I paid my employees enough to pay their own rent and for their own food, and included that cost in the price of my product. That cuts out the government middleman running all those housing and food programs. Paying workers what it costs them to work won't drive up inflation. You're paying for the rest of their wages already, plus program admin costs. Henry Ford knew all this. He paid his workers enough to afford to buy what they were making. It's not rocket science.
    edited September 2021 FileMakerFellermuthuk_vanalingam
  • Reply 19 of 20
    jcs2305jcs2305 Posts: 1,336member
    chadbag said:
    Homelessness in the US has a history.  At least with regards to the ones with mental illness.   Back in the 80s there were lawsuits that basically forced the mental illness hospitals to release all their patients as the judges said people couldn’t be held and treated without their consent (and being mentally ill they couldn’t easily give consent).  So the streets were flooded with folks who needed mental illness treatment and couldn’t be compelled to get it.  Been an issue ever since. (I recognize not all homeless fall into this category). 

    Also, to the comment about minimum wage.  Changing the minimum wage to force payment of so-called living wages wouldn’t fix the problem at all.  That is not how the economy works.  That just drives up inflation as prices are adjusted to soak up the extra money being paid out.   Not all jobs are meant to slow someone to support themselves independently.  Some are meant for first time job seekers like teenagers to gain work experience.  Or retired people to fill their days and allow socialization (I did not say al retired people who work dal into that category).  You’d be far better off helping people gain skills that qualify them for higher paying jobs than to force business to artificially raise wages above what the economic activity they are supporting warrants. 

    The purpose of the minimum wage was to stabilize the post-depression economy and protect the workers in the labor force. The minimum wage was designed to create a minimum standard of living to protect the health and well-being of employees. Others have argued that the primary purpose was to aid the lowest paid of the nation's working population, those who lacked sufficient bargaining power to secure for themselves a minimum subsistence wage.

    sub·sist·ence
    /səbˈsistəns/
    noun
    noun: subsistence
    1.
    the action or fact of maintaining or supporting oneself at a minimum level.
    "the minimum income needed for subsistence"










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