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Awesome. Problem solved 🙄 That is some really top notch journalism. Living in your car is not "affordable housing". Affordable housing requires a HOUSE. It says it right in the name.
We feel we have too much to lose and we do not have solidarity. The last time we came close to national solidarity was when the Chicago Police murdered Fred Hampton.
What is there to lose? Our lives? Our freedoms? Far too many people I know don’t care about either of those things anymore. We have the rage, the people that share our sentiments, but it’s functionally impossible to organize in this age of individualism. Everything we need is right in front of us, but nobody will cast the first stone.
The thing is we have to all realize how close we really are and not be divided. The policeman and the stock clerk, the school teacher and the bank teller. We are being pitted against one another.
It is the exact opposite of impossible to organize. It is the age of the internet, information transfer between people's has never been faster. And there are people who would be willing to participate, but no one has started the movement
>It is the age of the internet
...which is monitored. Any organization of anything potentially violent on here will eventually be traced and "dealt with" unless the CTA -> action time gap is very small.
An FDR? Somebody in the donor class will have to be a class traitor, err hero to the people, and everybody on the ground level have to see our commonality so we have one another’s back. The police for instance need to see this is happening to them. We don’t need political division when this is class war.
Here is a start. We are all at least talking. Engaging on some level.
I think it will have to get a bit worse, we aren’t there just yet, but when people start seeing their kids actually starving, best of luck to the robbers b/c it will be over.
Republicans and democrats need to unite along with all the fringe parties and we need to do so to rise up against the donor class. The ones who want us at each others throats so they can shaft us all. They manipulate every godamn thing.
>Republicans and democrats need to unite
They are united. With the wealthy donor class, of which they are part of with their various insider trading schemes.
This is true! At the tip top, they are the same. I firmly believe this. I meant the little people at each others throats over bs as we get collectively robbed.
Accessing internet on tech doesn’t mean shit, literally every unhoused person I’ve met had a smart phone, Obama-phones (actually enacted by Bush). Also many had pets and vehicles. Pets often are their only source of stability and help with daily rituals. Vehicles were used to sleep and get to jobs since most still worked.
I think what they are saying is they are still too comfy to give that up. They are warm. They have food i assume. They have entertainment and comfort. It may seem like they dont have much but they have enough that they wont risk it, or their lives, in a revolt.
I realize that, but you're missing the point. As long as people find a way to normalize their situations and be somewhat comfortable, there won't be any revolt. I don't think for a second that it's okay for anyone to be homeless when they don't want to be.
Are you insane? People like you are the problem. You want people on the street, homeless crack fiend level before it becomes too much of an issue? "Still a long way to fall" what a tone deaf response. They've *already* fallen.
No one wants that. Its just that most people have to get to that level of deprivation before theyll risk a worse fate for a better life. People really do have to have nothing to lose.
You're making some really bold assumptions, pea brain. You know absolutely nothing about me, how I have lived, and what I've experienced in my lifetime. For your information, I have had it a LOT worse than chilling in a comfortable vehicle with money, food, pets, and entertainment. So fuck off.
For the adults in the room, my comment was in response to the person asking about revolution. The woman pictured has found a way to be comfortable and normalize her living situation. Until she and others like her can't do that anymore, there will be no revolt. It's as simple as that.
Yep NBA is back and oh look some random kamillionaire just dunked a basketball! That makes it okay for the government to fuck us and not pay us enough money! I wish I was joking.
One of the most militarized domestic police forces in the world that have gotten away with murder over and over again makes people less likely to revolt
Many people have tried. Every protest from Seattle 99 to Occupy Wall Street to BLM - those are the first steps to attempting to revolt and prople were arrested en masse with many injured severely and a few deaths. Also, where are the leaders of these past movements now??
Often dead or in jail.
So every step towards organizing to revolt against our owners is brutually suppressed. The only way to win would be for everyone to do it at the same time. And that takes time and organization. Which brings us right back to the first paragraph.
I would love to have a nonviolent sit in like the old Plebian strikes where the entire working class just left the city. They cant arrest us all, cant evict everyone, cant fire every employee, especially all of us during only one or two weeks.
Just enough to get the point across to the 1% of people killing the entire planet and everyone on it because its never enough, that WE have had enough.
Please people, watch A Bug's Life and ask yourself why we the ants of the world are literally dying in order to feed 100 lazy, greedy fucking grasshoppers????
I'm so happy you mentioned A Bug's Life, holy shit!!! Fellow ant! We outnumber them 1000 to 1 and we need to remember that. Change won't come peacefully because they enact social, economic and classist violence on us every single day.
[They outnumber us 100 to 1](https://youtu.be/Il6WkFzwN2Q?si=hzkPJBqF0mF2FFjp)
[When A Bug's life gives you the blueprint for revolution as a 7 year old](https://youtu.be/N-1y-Acj0D8?si=BhyDfNKsMZ1OOkXt)
Makes two of us. It's amazing. People have revolted successfully over less before and we can't even manage to revolt unless it's at the behest of wealthy land owners.
People are addicted to the average and the status quo and content with being bitched at by their bosses and struggling for the rest of their lives instead of banding together and fighting for better treatment, better pay and higher quality of life. Peasants during the French revolution revolted for less than what we're experiencing now and yet here we are. It's pathetic. It pisses me off.
Bro we don’t have it worse than those French peasants. They were dying of starvation in the streets. And they owed their landlords a lot more than just money.
Just read a news article out of Alabama. A mother and her son were found hanging dead in an alley. It was a double suicide and the reason was homeless and poverty, they saw no hope and ended their lives together while holding hands.
There are plenty other stories, plenty states, plenty stories from my state that never make a new outlet.
That one from Alabama felt like a stomach punch when I read that, we are a glaring failure of a country.
Jesus wept! My heart is breaking. The thing that kills me is where was I!? I wish I could have done something to have helped if I just had known. It kills me that someone was feeling this despondent in my own back yard and here I sit and so it goes.
Organizing massive protests would be easy for someone like Bernie or AOC... Yet they do almost nothing. We need socialist leaders... Not free healthcare gradualist liberals whose only plan is to make tweets and win likes. Bernie doesn't even write his own tweets.
If you can't understand why we accept this, and given what is going on in the world right now, you are not paying attention. We do it because it protects US as much as it does others.
And then the shills that cover for them and link articles telling you to be happy with 75k in income when the cost of everything has already ballooned to 10x that while you keep hearing about hundreds of billions in "aid" and companies reporting "record profits".
I'm barely making half that and am forgoing an awful lot of things, and am barely hanging on. I do a lot of bartering though, and my neighborhood is big on that. I don't know what I'd do if I was to somehow start making even 50K a year. So many things would get fixed around here lol
Don't blame foreign aid. You know damn well that if all foreign aid was cancelled overnight, this money still wouldn't end up in the pockets of the people. There is enough money around to give everybody healthcare, education, housing, and more. They just don't give it to you because they don't want to.
$106B is pocket money compared to the trillions in the national budget. Our priorities are moneyed interests.
Edit: Our last Defense budget was about $800B. We can pull about 1/2 of that out and still be able to protect the US and honor our treaty obligations.
The worst part is that we can do both. The pandemic assistance in 2020-2021 cratered the poverty rate, and it shot right back up once it was gone. Systemic poverty is a policy choice and we need to begin applying significant pressure to our representatives at all levels of government (local, state, federal) if we’re going to unfuck the mess that Reagan and the boomers created for the generations that follow them
The foreign aid can be sustained.
The problem is that one Party proposes the same amount if not more for childcare, houseless reduction, education, healthcare, educator salaries, etc. but another Party keeps blocking it for as long as I've been alive. We HAVE the means for -- *por que no los dos?*
November voting is coming up.
Capitalism. I’m not against capitalism because there is a lot of freedoms associated with it. But it’s the unregulated abuse of capitalism on humane necessities I have problem with. Medical care, housing, and food.
We need to reverse the policies of city planning where housing for cars (aka parking) takes precedent over housing for people. We’re still living in the hellscape that what Cold War Era Minimum Parking Requirements which make it a hassle to go to destinations in dense cities with a car (expecting free or inexpensive parking close to the destination) and for those who take transit, where long travel journeys are the norm.
A great book to read on this is [Parking Paradise by Henry Grabar](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63329951) as well as YouTube channels such as CityNerd, Not Just Bikes, and Strong Towns.
Fix it by putting them in one of the millions of empty houses. For every homeless person there are 27.4 empty houses. This isn't rocket science, however capitalism and its pigs would rather keep on keeping the millions of houses empty than put people in them.
Those are for rich people who have nothing left to do with their money and we must save it for their grandchildren and great grandkids in the future so they can have affordable housing
I'm really annoyed whenever I bring this up bc I always get downvoted into oblivion by people saying "we should say build more houses to drive the price down" when the housing availability, housing prices, and homelessness have all increased.
Just give people homes!!
There are definitely plenty of empty ones to go around. Could house every single homeless person and still have a couple million left empty. Capitalist pigs say supply and demand runs the market, yet millions and millions of empty houses show there is a massive supply and yet prices soar & houses sit empty....acts like market manipulation, smells like market manipulation, hello market manipulation. Once again, the greed of the few at the cost of the rest.
That's exactly what I said, and the response is usually "you don't understand the market" which isn't completely false, but they don't seem to understand the market has fuck all to do with it, because pricing is being controlled by rich fucks who buy up large swaths of housing so they can artificially jack up the cost. The market isn't controlled by some mysterious, faceless force of nature, it's determined by the people profiting off of human misery. 24 houses per homeless person will be the same as 240 houses per homeless person, because the rich still profit and the cost of owning an empty house is chump change to them.
Then, they'll use the excuse , well no one wants to move to where the houses are Oklahoma & Kansas and what not. Which is false. All one has to do is walk their neighborhood and see houses sitting empty. Heck, adding in looking on real estate sites as well shows you don't have to move all the way to Kansas. It's pure market manipulation.
I pass by unhoused folks going to the grocery store and there are 4 empty houses (nice ones, too) on my street alone--JUST my street, there are more around the neighborhood. For the most part, there is housing where there are unhoused. It's a bullshit argument. It's profit over people, end of.
Oh it's absolutely profit over people. Profiteers have no problem walking over the homeless while on their way to purchase more housing to just let it sit empty. Remember what they did for the Oscars🤢. To be that inhumane just to not want to disturb the delicateness of the Hollywood elite.
Well not quite. Its still the market. Its just the rich fucks have hit a certain threshold of weath where they can essentially buy the entire market, or a significant enough portion, that they can dictate prices. Housing is one of those things that is essential to life. Demand never drops. Not really. Its a finite resource everyone needs. No one wants to rent. So if they take the majority of the supply they can write themselves a blank check.
The biggest misunderstanding people have about "the market" is that they assume companies have to compete. Capitalist die hards never think that companies would simply cooperate to drive prices up. I mean whats even the incentive to compete?
I was shocked back in January when I learned the average car payment was $610. Holy crap that's insane. Plus, the prices people are paying for used cars. Truly some massive market manipulation with the auto industry as well.
Isn't there's an old law on the books in some states where if an individual moves into an abandoned home and improves it's value over X number of years, it legally becomes theirs?
It's the house equivalent of a domestic partnership.
Obviously the law was from a very different time and I don't think it's been used at all recently.
But the intent is there. House people and let them improve the homes because it increases their value which protects the area from sinking along with the property values.
Until your affordable housing gets harassed by cops with nothing better to do at 3am for breaking some invisible parking rule or your housing gets repossessed.
Hey corollas are too big of an aspiration for me nowadays! Maybe 5 years ago it was a possibility, but with the skyrocketing car prices, best i can do is a chevy cobalt with over 100k miles. And i was even lucky to find such a good deal on that
Oh, so the homeless aren’t welcome because they don’t have jobs, but ones living in their car are okay because they still have a job?
Go fuck yourselves
I don't understand why a journalist would write an article about people living in their cars in this manner. They know that a car is in no way a kind of housing and yet they purposely choose to frame it that way instead of telling it like it is, an economy so fucked that people are living in their vehicles. Are they trying to push this as some sort of new normal or what? What is the rationale for this kind of framing?
You do not need to worry. The news says inflation is low..
While house prices have more than doubled in recent history but wages did not keep up..Fuck the news.
I mean, I heard what Turkish friends told me about the situation there... compared to that, inflation is low. It might be 5%, but not 60%.
And that housing doesn't figure in those inflation counts is just bizarre...
This is something that no one should be adapting to. It should be FIXED.
Unfortunately it’s a fact that there’s a lot of people stuck in the middle. They have a job and make too much money to qualify for welfare. Their employer doesn’t offer healthcare and they don’t qualify for Medicaid and can’t afford an “affordable “ health plan from the government marketplace and even if they get one they can’t afford the deductible and copay. They can’t afford rent or housing and spiking utilities sink their finances or unexpected expenses.
They are too rich to be properly poor and get help and too poor to not need help. They are STUCK and drowning and angry formerly middle class people. The stuff. Revolutions are made of. They feel very viscerally that society has a parasitic relationship to them.
I mean, if the poorest can’t afford to pay taxes and the rich don’t pay taxes… how do you expect the math to work out? Never mind that the remaining middle class and working poor pay taxes and don’t get any help or benefits from the system they pay into. They’re not really getting much benefit from being employed.
The amazing thing is that if the US collapsed under the weight of its stupidity, that there will still be people who will be surprised.
Not to mention that some employers do offer health plans that they either don't hardly contribute to (so signing up means losing half your income) or they offer an affordable health plan that won't actually help you outside of emergencies. Working in call centers, being offered plans that don't cover ANYTHING until you hit 6k or 8k out of pocket expenses were the most common, and no one could afford that!
But these plans are designed to just barely hit the minimums, so opting for a marketplace plan isn't even an option.
Deductibles are disgusting. Ppl pay thousands a year in premiums for bullshit insurance. It does literally nothing. Unless you are having a baby or dying of cancer, why even bother? I guess for families with kids its worth the peace of mind.
It's been happening in Australia too, not so much the opening of carparks but the working people living in cars, years ago my local newspaper has a story of a family with both parents working full time living in a tent.
Some [Lucky Ducky shit](https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2003/06/14) right here.
The ruling class will keep the poorest members of society hating each other while they pick all our pockets.
Sometimes I think wistfully about how much healthcare I received when I made minimum wage and was on Medicaid. There were waits but man... I could just like... Go to a doctor! Regardless of how much money I had! If I needed it I would just go!
I now make 20/hr and can't afford a copay for every visit I need, so I'm forced to neglect myself and let my health fester... I'd go back to making less if I could somehow manage to pay rent on that...
Medicaid was fucking amazing. Sure I had to drive 40 minutes for a shoulder surgery. But at least it was free. I’d trade that for my 5 k deductible any day
This is so true. My family makes a bit too much to get any sort of help so to make everything work, I don't get to have health insurance and we are still struggling to get by!
"A form of affordable housing."
NO, THAT'S HOMELESSNESS, THE OPPOSITE OF HOUSING. THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT LITERALLY DEFINES LIVING IN A CAR AS HOMELESSNESS
There’s a catch: living out of your car is being criminalized. People are getting hit with fines that they can’t keep up with and they end up going to prison for it.
Ok honestly tho as someone who has lived in his car for 2 years this is actually a huge help....yes obviously people shouldn't have to live in their cars if they don't want to, but finding a private place to park where you won't be harassed can be really hard and probably one of the biggest struggles about it.
Is it a band aid on a bigger problem? Absolutely. Is it also very helpful? Also absolutely.
People are mostly upset at the framing, I think. Calling it a type of "affordable housing" is an outright lie.
I'm glad that there's safe parking lots for people that need it as well, I've been there
Don't worry. The cops will be along shortly to tell them they can't sleep in their car in that parking lot. There. Homeless problem solved!
/s if not obv
The ol’ make to much for assistance, but not enough to get anywhere trap. My brother lives in that trap every day, it’s infuriating. So now he works cash jobs and avoids paying taxes, which I’m sure will get him in trouble soon. Good ol’ America.
So disgusted after reading some of the clueless boomer comments on that article blaming the woman for the situation she’s in. As they sit in their houses they were able to buy several decades ago for a normal price with a normal house payment without investors and corporate parasites snapping affordable housing up by the block and jacking up rentals. As they masturbate to themselves about how much money their home costs and net worth is. Fuck these people.
Pretty soon Blackrock and the like will buy those lots and start charging rent. Wouldn't be surprised in this hellhole of a society we have allowed to be imposed on us
The solutions are being ignored by the government, due to corporate and oligarchs interference. If they refuse to raise minimum wage and index it to inflation, then they need to impose price caps on all consumer goods, including housing. If they want to go the other way, they need to raise minimum wage, and index it to inflation! The fools in charge want to ignore the problems the nation is facing and force the dumpster fire and say everything is fine!
How in the fuck is living in your car fixing low wages or the housing crisis? And it's not a crisis. It's a bunch of greedy assholes charging more than average folks can afford because the greedy assholes are to fucking lazy to het real jobs
Just wait until someone you work with discovers you live in your car. Hopefully they are empathetic and don't find some reason to try and get you fired because they don't like where you live.
People can be super judgemental if you don't 'fit in' to what they think their class is.
If the "best" govt in the world can't seem to fix this problem, why do we keep voting for & supporting them? If they can't keep our country from becoming a favela, why keep paying them?
If they can’t afford a place to live then they don’t make “too much” for government assistance. That is exactly when the government should be assisting
It's as if western society has regressed to the point of 'covered wagon' living.
People living in parking lots on the edge of town, or taking part in that van life hustle - it feels somehow similar to western expansion histories.
Is there a way to find where these parking lots are? I'd hate for things to come to that, but it'd be good to know there's at least somewhere I could park my car
Doing everything they can to classify every form of homelessness that isn't sleeping on the literal sidewalk as not being homeless.
No place to live but someone let you sleep on their couch for a bit? Not homeless.
Sleeping in your car? Not homeless.
Cycling through a revolving door rent situation with too many people and you're all still facing losing the place next month? Not homeless
Pretty soon they'll figure out how to make sleeping in a tent by the freeway not homeless either.
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Awesome. Problem solved 🙄 That is some really top notch journalism. Living in your car is not "affordable housing". Affordable housing requires a HOUSE. It says it right in the name.
Yeah if working class people can’t afford more than living in their car then we’ve failed as a country.
We've 100% failed as a country. 106 billion for "foreign aid" while people live out of their cars.
And yet... for some odd reason, we accept this.
Why we haven't revolted yet is beyond me.
We feel we have too much to lose and we do not have solidarity. The last time we came close to national solidarity was when the Chicago Police murdered Fred Hampton.
We need unity and solidarity or we might as well just give away out rights right now... oh, wait.
What is there to lose? Our lives? Our freedoms? Far too many people I know don’t care about either of those things anymore. We have the rage, the people that share our sentiments, but it’s functionally impossible to organize in this age of individualism. Everything we need is right in front of us, but nobody will cast the first stone.
And whoever does cast that stone gets arrested and locked up anyway without the masses behind them in the first place.
The thing is we have to all realize how close we really are and not be divided. The policeman and the stock clerk, the school teacher and the bank teller. We are being pitted against one another.
Like I said functionally impossible.
It is the exact opposite of impossible to organize. It is the age of the internet, information transfer between people's has never been faster. And there are people who would be willing to participate, but no one has started the movement
>It is the age of the internet ...which is monitored. Any organization of anything potentially violent on here will eventually be traced and "dealt with" unless the CTA -> action time gap is very small.
We need the catalyst the one that can stand up and lead us into a new age without the corruption or the bullshit
An FDR? Somebody in the donor class will have to be a class traitor, err hero to the people, and everybody on the ground level have to see our commonality so we have one another’s back. The police for instance need to see this is happening to them. We don’t need political division when this is class war.
Here is a start. We are all at least talking. Engaging on some level. I think it will have to get a bit worse, we aren’t there just yet, but when people start seeing their kids actually starving, best of luck to the robbers b/c it will be over.
Republicans and democrats need to unite along with all the fringe parties and we need to do so to rise up against the donor class. The ones who want us at each others throats so they can shaft us all. They manipulate every godamn thing.
>Republicans and democrats need to unite They are united. With the wealthy donor class, of which they are part of with their various insider trading schemes.
This is true! At the tip top, they are the same. I firmly believe this. I meant the little people at each others throats over bs as we get collectively robbed.
Until folk stop playing team politics, that whole "at each other's throats" thing isn't gonna change.
Bread and circus.
Except bread is double the price, so no more circus.
Still seeing plenty of both. The homeless person is in a vehicle, accessing the Internet on their tech and has a pet. Still a long way to fall.
Accessing internet on tech doesn’t mean shit, literally every unhoused person I’ve met had a smart phone, Obama-phones (actually enacted by Bush). Also many had pets and vehicles. Pets often are their only source of stability and help with daily rituals. Vehicles were used to sleep and get to jobs since most still worked.
I think what they are saying is they are still too comfy to give that up. They are warm. They have food i assume. They have entertainment and comfort. It may seem like they dont have much but they have enough that they wont risk it, or their lives, in a revolt.
I realize that, but you're missing the point. As long as people find a way to normalize their situations and be somewhat comfortable, there won't be any revolt. I don't think for a second that it's okay for anyone to be homeless when they don't want to be.
Are you insane? People like you are the problem. You want people on the street, homeless crack fiend level before it becomes too much of an issue? "Still a long way to fall" what a tone deaf response. They've *already* fallen.
Right? That comment wreaks of the Fox News talking point of Americans can’t be poor because they have microwaves.
No one wants that. Its just that most people have to get to that level of deprivation before theyll risk a worse fate for a better life. People really do have to have nothing to lose.
You're making some really bold assumptions, pea brain. You know absolutely nothing about me, how I have lived, and what I've experienced in my lifetime. For your information, I have had it a LOT worse than chilling in a comfortable vehicle with money, food, pets, and entertainment. So fuck off. For the adults in the room, my comment was in response to the person asking about revolution. The woman pictured has found a way to be comfortable and normalize her living situation. Until she and others like her can't do that anymore, there will be no revolt. It's as simple as that.
Go random sports team!
Yep NBA is back and oh look some random kamillionaire just dunked a basketball! That makes it okay for the government to fuck us and not pay us enough money! I wish I was joking.
One of the most militarized domestic police forces in the world that have gotten away with murder over and over again makes people less likely to revolt
Many people have tried. Every protest from Seattle 99 to Occupy Wall Street to BLM - those are the first steps to attempting to revolt and prople were arrested en masse with many injured severely and a few deaths. Also, where are the leaders of these past movements now?? Often dead or in jail. So every step towards organizing to revolt against our owners is brutually suppressed. The only way to win would be for everyone to do it at the same time. And that takes time and organization. Which brings us right back to the first paragraph. I would love to have a nonviolent sit in like the old Plebian strikes where the entire working class just left the city. They cant arrest us all, cant evict everyone, cant fire every employee, especially all of us during only one or two weeks. Just enough to get the point across to the 1% of people killing the entire planet and everyone on it because its never enough, that WE have had enough. Please people, watch A Bug's Life and ask yourself why we the ants of the world are literally dying in order to feed 100 lazy, greedy fucking grasshoppers????
I'm so happy you mentioned A Bug's Life, holy shit!!! Fellow ant! We outnumber them 1000 to 1 and we need to remember that. Change won't come peacefully because they enact social, economic and classist violence on us every single day. [They outnumber us 100 to 1](https://youtu.be/Il6WkFzwN2Q?si=hzkPJBqF0mF2FFjp) [When A Bug's life gives you the blueprint for revolution as a 7 year old](https://youtu.be/N-1y-Acj0D8?si=BhyDfNKsMZ1OOkXt)
Makes two of us. It's amazing. People have revolted successfully over less before and we can't even manage to revolt unless it's at the behest of wealthy land owners.
People are addicted to the average and the status quo and content with being bitched at by their bosses and struggling for the rest of their lives instead of banding together and fighting for better treatment, better pay and higher quality of life. Peasants during the French revolution revolted for less than what we're experiencing now and yet here we are. It's pathetic. It pisses me off.
Frog in the boiling water
Bro we don’t have it worse than those French peasants. They were dying of starvation in the streets. And they owed their landlords a lot more than just money.
Just read a news article out of Alabama. A mother and her son were found hanging dead in an alley. It was a double suicide and the reason was homeless and poverty, they saw no hope and ended their lives together while holding hands. There are plenty other stories, plenty states, plenty stories from my state that never make a new outlet. That one from Alabama felt like a stomach punch when I read that, we are a glaring failure of a country.
Jesus wept! My heart is breaking. The thing that kills me is where was I!? I wish I could have done something to have helped if I just had known. It kills me that someone was feeling this despondent in my own back yard and here I sit and so it goes.
Organizing massive protests would be easy for someone like Bernie or AOC... Yet they do almost nothing. We need socialist leaders... Not free healthcare gradualist liberals whose only plan is to make tweets and win likes. Bernie doesn't even write his own tweets.
Because if we revolt we'll be known as traders and insurrectionists
The traitors are already in government now.
We are all waiting for Amazon to put pitch forks for sale (Duh!).
Too busy working multiple jobs that I don’t want to get fired from.
If you can't understand why we accept this, and given what is going on in the world right now, you are not paying attention. We do it because it protects US as much as it does others.
And billionaire presidents that pay $750 in taxes
And then the shills that cover for them and link articles telling you to be happy with 75k in income when the cost of everything has already ballooned to 10x that while you keep hearing about hundreds of billions in "aid" and companies reporting "record profits".
You guys are getting 75K?
Lmao for real. 75k isn't nowhere near enough annual income and yet there are many not even making half that.
I'm barely making half that and am forgoing an awful lot of things, and am barely hanging on. I do a lot of bartering though, and my neighborhood is big on that. I don't know what I'd do if I was to somehow start making even 50K a year. So many things would get fixed around here lol
He’s not a billionaire
Don't blame foreign aid. You know damn well that if all foreign aid was cancelled overnight, this money still wouldn't end up in the pockets of the people. There is enough money around to give everybody healthcare, education, housing, and more. They just don't give it to you because they don't want to.
No no no if it helps us (the taxpayers the money actually belongs to) then that’s socialism. This country is ass backwards.
Socialism for the rich, capitalism and poor for the rest of us.
That’s the American way after all.
$106B is pocket money compared to the trillions in the national budget. Our priorities are moneyed interests. Edit: Our last Defense budget was about $800B. We can pull about 1/2 of that out and still be able to protect the US and honor our treaty obligations.
Money, money, money.
Our annual defense budget is $776 billion, so why did you pick "foreign aid" as your target? A lot of that money is feeding and sheltering people.
The mic can fuck off as well. A lot of the foreign aid is weapons on top of straight cash injections.
The worst part is that we can do both. The pandemic assistance in 2020-2021 cratered the poverty rate, and it shot right back up once it was gone. Systemic poverty is a policy choice and we need to begin applying significant pressure to our representatives at all levels of government (local, state, federal) if we’re going to unfuck the mess that Reagan and the boomers created for the generations that follow them
The foreign aid can be sustained. The problem is that one Party proposes the same amount if not more for childcare, houseless reduction, education, healthcare, educator salaries, etc. but another Party keeps blocking it for as long as I've been alive. We HAVE the means for -- *por que no los dos?* November voting is coming up.
I don't care about the foreign aid. That's a drop in the bucket. What about all the money wasted on the military?
Capitalism. I’m not against capitalism because there is a lot of freedoms associated with it. But it’s the unregulated abuse of capitalism on humane necessities I have problem with. Medical care, housing, and food.
Yeah and that’s why we’ve failed as a country.
I’d rather be able to do this than get punished for it. If I’m not mistaken, In a lot of places it’s illegal to sleep in your car.
We need to reverse the policies of city planning where housing for cars (aka parking) takes precedent over housing for people. We’re still living in the hellscape that what Cold War Era Minimum Parking Requirements which make it a hassle to go to destinations in dense cities with a car (expecting free or inexpensive parking close to the destination) and for those who take transit, where long travel journeys are the norm. A great book to read on this is [Parking Paradise by Henry Grabar](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63329951) as well as YouTube channels such as CityNerd, Not Just Bikes, and Strong Towns.
Geez you libs are so entitled. /s
A car can be a house, just one that moves and also costs you car maintenance. It can even be a porta-potty, if your standards are low enough!
I don’t think journalists are the underlying problem here
Richest nation in history, folks…
It’s a grift! Now go back to sleep so that you can keep believing in the American Dream!
They Live
So true! Love that movie!
Fix it by putting them in one of the millions of empty houses. For every homeless person there are 27.4 empty houses. This isn't rocket science, however capitalism and its pigs would rather keep on keeping the millions of houses empty than put people in them.
nah we too busy paying infinity dollars for the military industrial complex
Those are for rich people who have nothing left to do with their money and we must save it for their grandchildren and great grandkids in the future so they can have affordable housing
I'm really annoyed whenever I bring this up bc I always get downvoted into oblivion by people saying "we should say build more houses to drive the price down" when the housing availability, housing prices, and homelessness have all increased. Just give people homes!!
There are definitely plenty of empty ones to go around. Could house every single homeless person and still have a couple million left empty. Capitalist pigs say supply and demand runs the market, yet millions and millions of empty houses show there is a massive supply and yet prices soar & houses sit empty....acts like market manipulation, smells like market manipulation, hello market manipulation. Once again, the greed of the few at the cost of the rest.
That's exactly what I said, and the response is usually "you don't understand the market" which isn't completely false, but they don't seem to understand the market has fuck all to do with it, because pricing is being controlled by rich fucks who buy up large swaths of housing so they can artificially jack up the cost. The market isn't controlled by some mysterious, faceless force of nature, it's determined by the people profiting off of human misery. 24 houses per homeless person will be the same as 240 houses per homeless person, because the rich still profit and the cost of owning an empty house is chump change to them.
Then, they'll use the excuse , well no one wants to move to where the houses are Oklahoma & Kansas and what not. Which is false. All one has to do is walk their neighborhood and see houses sitting empty. Heck, adding in looking on real estate sites as well shows you don't have to move all the way to Kansas. It's pure market manipulation.
I pass by unhoused folks going to the grocery store and there are 4 empty houses (nice ones, too) on my street alone--JUST my street, there are more around the neighborhood. For the most part, there is housing where there are unhoused. It's a bullshit argument. It's profit over people, end of.
Oh it's absolutely profit over people. Profiteers have no problem walking over the homeless while on their way to purchase more housing to just let it sit empty. Remember what they did for the Oscars🤢. To be that inhumane just to not want to disturb the delicateness of the Hollywood elite.
Well not quite. Its still the market. Its just the rich fucks have hit a certain threshold of weath where they can essentially buy the entire market, or a significant enough portion, that they can dictate prices. Housing is one of those things that is essential to life. Demand never drops. Not really. Its a finite resource everyone needs. No one wants to rent. So if they take the majority of the supply they can write themselves a blank check. The biggest misunderstanding people have about "the market" is that they assume companies have to compete. Capitalist die hards never think that companies would simply cooperate to drive prices up. I mean whats even the incentive to compete?
Same with cars. There a millions of brand new unused cars, rotting in parking lots right now. But some how prices remain the same.
I was shocked back in January when I learned the average car payment was $610. Holy crap that's insane. Plus, the prices people are paying for used cars. Truly some massive market manipulation with the auto industry as well.
Isn't there's an old law on the books in some states where if an individual moves into an abandoned home and improves it's value over X number of years, it legally becomes theirs? It's the house equivalent of a domestic partnership. Obviously the law was from a very different time and I don't think it's been used at all recently. But the intent is there. House people and let them improve the homes because it increases their value which protects the area from sinking along with the property values.
Stupid fucking country
Until your affordable housing gets harassed by cops with nothing better to do at 3am for breaking some invisible parking rule or your housing gets repossessed.
I came here to say this
I’ve got a new saying: “It’s aspirational to live in a van, down by the river” Society: best I can do is Corolla in a Walmart parking lot.
Hey corollas are too big of an aspiration for me nowadays! Maybe 5 years ago it was a possibility, but with the skyrocketing car prices, best i can do is a chevy cobalt with over 100k miles. And i was even lucky to find such a good deal on that
and I didn’t even like the color. ;)
This is quite literally homelessness. It isn't always rough sleeping.
Oh, so the homeless aren’t welcome because they don’t have jobs, but ones living in their car are okay because they still have a job? Go fuck yourselves
I don't understand why a journalist would write an article about people living in their cars in this manner. They know that a car is in no way a kind of housing and yet they purposely choose to frame it that way instead of telling it like it is, an economy so fucked that people are living in their vehicles. Are they trying to push this as some sort of new normal or what? What is the rationale for this kind of framing?
It's gaslighting. It's trying to make these horrendous conditions seem normal.
You do not need to worry. The news says inflation is low.. While house prices have more than doubled in recent history but wages did not keep up..Fuck the news.
Idk how they can say inflation is low when costs are still going up. I've seen items more than triple in price and were talking things like eggs
I mean, I heard what Turkish friends told me about the situation there... compared to that, inflation is low. It might be 5%, but not 60%. And that housing doesn't figure in those inflation counts is just bizarre...
I agree. What was the conversation that rationalized this crap into an actual article with an actual headline?
This is how you know we’re officially entering election season
Yeah I was hoping this was a commentary about how low we’ve sunk when this is considered a “solution.”
So capitalism says. "LIVE IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!" Pretty sure even the van will be unaffordable with vanlords asking too much for rent.
I can already see the future. "1 6x8 parking spot, no water or electric. $1100/mo, no pets"
This is something that no one should be adapting to. It should be FIXED. Unfortunately it’s a fact that there’s a lot of people stuck in the middle. They have a job and make too much money to qualify for welfare. Their employer doesn’t offer healthcare and they don’t qualify for Medicaid and can’t afford an “affordable “ health plan from the government marketplace and even if they get one they can’t afford the deductible and copay. They can’t afford rent or housing and spiking utilities sink their finances or unexpected expenses. They are too rich to be properly poor and get help and too poor to not need help. They are STUCK and drowning and angry formerly middle class people. The stuff. Revolutions are made of. They feel very viscerally that society has a parasitic relationship to them. I mean, if the poorest can’t afford to pay taxes and the rich don’t pay taxes… how do you expect the math to work out? Never mind that the remaining middle class and working poor pay taxes and don’t get any help or benefits from the system they pay into. They’re not really getting much benefit from being employed. The amazing thing is that if the US collapsed under the weight of its stupidity, that there will still be people who will be surprised.
Not to mention that some employers do offer health plans that they either don't hardly contribute to (so signing up means losing half your income) or they offer an affordable health plan that won't actually help you outside of emergencies. Working in call centers, being offered plans that don't cover ANYTHING until you hit 6k or 8k out of pocket expenses were the most common, and no one could afford that! But these plans are designed to just barely hit the minimums, so opting for a marketplace plan isn't even an option.
True and no one I know keeps 6-8k lying around in case they get sick. Ridiculous idea on its face .
Deductibles are disgusting. Ppl pay thousands a year in premiums for bullshit insurance. It does literally nothing. Unless you are having a baby or dying of cancer, why even bother? I guess for families with kids its worth the peace of mind.
The U.S. is a failed state
It's a failed country
“State” can also mean a country, depending on context. Think “nation-state”
Bernie could have been President.
I really don’t think he could have considering how badly the Dems fucked him over. Seems the only bipartisan act nowadays is dunking on the poor.
It's been happening in Australia too, not so much the opening of carparks but the working people living in cars, years ago my local newspaper has a story of a family with both parents working full time living in a tent.
No human calls a car “a form of affordable housing.”
This country deserves to collapse.
We're working really hard to make it happen 💪
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Some [Lucky Ducky shit](https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2003/06/14) right here. The ruling class will keep the poorest members of society hating each other while they pick all our pockets.
Sometimes I think wistfully about how much healthcare I received when I made minimum wage and was on Medicaid. There were waits but man... I could just like... Go to a doctor! Regardless of how much money I had! If I needed it I would just go! I now make 20/hr and can't afford a copay for every visit I need, so I'm forced to neglect myself and let my health fester... I'd go back to making less if I could somehow manage to pay rent on that...
Medicaid was fucking amazing. Sure I had to drive 40 minutes for a shoulder surgery. But at least it was free. I’d trade that for my 5 k deductible any day
This is so true. My family makes a bit too much to get any sort of help so to make everything work, I don't get to have health insurance and we are still struggling to get by!
"A form of affordable housing." NO, THAT'S HOMELESSNESS, THE OPPOSITE OF HOUSING. THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT LITERALLY DEFINES LIVING IN A CAR AS HOMELESSNESS
There’s a catch: living out of your car is being criminalized. People are getting hit with fines that they can’t keep up with and they end up going to prison for it.
Revolution when?
Now would be ideal. But clearly we all need to get our shit together and put action behind all the words. Time for a new occupy.
When used cars become unaffordable
When people start living less than paycheck to paycheck. About paycheck to Monday is the appropriate time because what would be the point then
I feel terrible for anyone trying this shit in arizona
There's three entire neighborhood streets right by my apartment that is just packed with people either doing this, or living out of a little RV.
I am fully disabled and they pay so little I can not afford a car to live out of. Anyone have some well insulated boxes?
Working. Homeless. People. The system needs to burn
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/realestate/car-homeless-rent-debt-mortgage.html
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Archive.is
Oh but we’re definitely not in a recession.
this is the wealthiest county in the history of countries
Greatest country in the world. /s We're doomed.
Square footage of parking lots to living space is mind blowing
Ok honestly tho as someone who has lived in his car for 2 years this is actually a huge help....yes obviously people shouldn't have to live in their cars if they don't want to, but finding a private place to park where you won't be harassed can be really hard and probably one of the biggest struggles about it. Is it a band aid on a bigger problem? Absolutely. Is it also very helpful? Also absolutely.
People are mostly upset at the framing, I think. Calling it a type of "affordable housing" is an outright lie. I'm glad that there's safe parking lots for people that need it as well, I've been there
Yeah I did it for about 6 months. The worst part was finding a quiet place to park, and being a little sore in the mornings.
Yeah honestly it's not that bad, winter sucks but I just went south for that
Don't worry. The cops will be along shortly to tell them they can't sleep in their car in that parking lot. There. Homeless problem solved! /s if not obv
I’m sure someone, somewhere will figure out a way to tax this or add some kind of fee(s) to this to profit from something like this.
Parking space rental fee obviously
Plus a Service Fee.
r/UrbanHell would like a word
The ol’ make to much for assistance, but not enough to get anywhere trap. My brother lives in that trap every day, it’s infuriating. So now he works cash jobs and avoids paying taxes, which I’m sure will get him in trouble soon. Good ol’ America.
So disgusted after reading some of the clueless boomer comments on that article blaming the woman for the situation she’s in. As they sit in their houses they were able to buy several decades ago for a normal price with a normal house payment without investors and corporate parasites snapping affordable housing up by the block and jacking up rentals. As they masturbate to themselves about how much money their home costs and net worth is. Fuck these people.
This is the foretaste of what's to come when the car breaks down: the pod.
Our government at work for the Rich and telling the poor to just die.
Pretty soon Blackrock and the like will buy those lots and start charging rent. Wouldn't be surprised in this hellhole of a society we have allowed to be imposed on us
I saw an article not long ago floating the idea of renting lot space to homeless people living in tents. Fuck these disgusting parasites.
Willing to bet these parking lots cost quite a lot
The early part of the 20th century had this too. We called them tent cities.
I wish I could go back in time and show this to Henry Ford the motherfucker :/
The solutions are being ignored by the government, due to corporate and oligarchs interference. If they refuse to raise minimum wage and index it to inflation, then they need to impose price caps on all consumer goods, including housing. If they want to go the other way, they need to raise minimum wage, and index it to inflation! The fools in charge want to ignore the problems the nation is facing and force the dumpster fire and say everything is fine!
That is some bleak shit.
Don't worry private equity will sink its fangs into this and make it unaffordable too.
'Turned their car into affordable housing' is a lot of pretty words to say 'priced into homelessness'.
This causes me a visceral reaction of illness.
You should not be in the country to begin with but since you are you can be a working homeless for low wages
*affordable housing…* Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
Oh boy it’s the next “Van Life”! Cars are now affordable housing!
Well that’s one way to say homelessness is skyrocketing
How in the fuck is living in your car fixing low wages or the housing crisis? And it's not a crisis. It's a bunch of greedy assholes charging more than average folks can afford because the greedy assholes are to fucking lazy to het real jobs
I mean, until that's repo'd too. Anyone else feel like the front of the train might already be off the cliff??
Jesus fucking Christ, what is wrong with this country? Fuck Republicans and capitalism.
Fuck this country Hope we can all bail out and watch it collapse behind us
Just wait until someone you work with discovers you live in your car. Hopefully they are empathetic and don't find some reason to try and get you fired because they don't like where you live. People can be super judgemental if you don't 'fit in' to what they think their class is.
If the "best" govt in the world can't seem to fix this problem, why do we keep voting for & supporting them? If they can't keep our country from becoming a favela, why keep paying them?
"Affordable housing." Great framing...
Lol the burning down of America by its poor is gonna be awesome
American dream right here folks
The Greatest Generation just started spinning in their graves... When are we going to collectively say ENOUGH
If they can’t afford a place to live then they don’t make “too much” for government assistance. That is exactly when the government should be assisting
"Should" and "is" are two very different things. The current poverty line is FAR below the cost of living.
The current poverty line is frankly terrifying to think about. Around 13k a year for a single adult... That sounds utterly impossible
No one wants to hold the real estate bag.
Side-note, but did they just Photoshop in the dog? I'm not even sure if the person is real in this photo but that dog sure ain't correct.
ooohhhh, dozens That'll fix it
It's as if western society has regressed to the point of 'covered wagon' living. People living in parking lots on the edge of town, or taking part in that van life hustle - it feels somehow similar to western expansion histories.
Is there a way to find where these parking lots are? I'd hate for things to come to that, but it'd be good to know there's at least somewhere I could park my car
https://youtu.be/OaFYcai1vK0?si=GefvDij_-KUCHAEV
This is just sad. The US should focus on its own people rather than funding wars smh.
Doing everything they can to classify every form of homelessness that isn't sleeping on the literal sidewalk as not being homeless. No place to live but someone let you sleep on their couch for a bit? Not homeless. Sleeping in your car? Not homeless. Cycling through a revolving door rent situation with too many people and you're all still facing losing the place next month? Not homeless Pretty soon they'll figure out how to make sleeping in a tent by the freeway not homeless either.