Hundreds of unsheltered people living in tent encampments in the blocks surrounding the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco have been forced to leave by city outreach workers and police as part of an attempted “clean up the house” ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s annual free trade conference.
The action, which housing advocates allege violated a court injunction, was celebrated by right-wing figures and the tech crowd, who have long been convinced that the city is in terminal decline because of an increase in encampments in the downtown area.
The X account End Wokness wrote that the displacement was proof the “government can easily fix our cities overnight. It just doesn’t want to” (the post received 77,000 likes). “Queer Eye but it’s just Xi visiting troubled US cities then they get a makeover,” joked Packy McCormick, the founder of Not Boring Capital and advisor to Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto VC team. The New York Post celebrated the action, saying that residents had “miraculously disappeared.”
While I agree we should be solving the root problem of homelessness equitably, the headline is misleading as I know many people on the left were also happy to have clean streets for a while.
Live in Bay Area, vote progressive/left, so ready for encampment to be less of a thing - in favor of some better solution like what they have near Oracle Stadium.
If the streets were cleaned by putting people in housing, it would be worth celebrating, but there’s nothing left wing about people being displaced from where you personally live. Even if those “people on the left” have certain left wing values, it’s right wing selfishness that made them happy. Those homeless people just got pushed elsewhere and those areas have to deal with a rise in the unhoused. The streets can only be, “cleaned,” by housing people, otherwise you’re just sweeping the, “filthy poors,” into another person’s area.
From an amoral economic perspective, we should either get people shelter and make them productive members of society, or just hasten their inevitable deaths on the streets by executing them ourselves. Give them a helping hand, or accept that we don’t think that they deserve life if they can’t play the capitalist game. The current approach costs us more money, prolongs their suffering, but gives us plausible deniability through ignorance. Fuck ignorance. Just embrace that the system is evil.
Lol what? I don’t think they would appreciate being executed, and would gladly take the status quo over being “out of their misery” 🙄
It’s a “Modest Proposal.” A satirical joke. It points out the absurdity of the current system and attitudes about unhoused people being filth that need to be cleaned away. You usually clean dirty things by washing away the grime and taking the waste to the dump. It’s no way to describe actual people.
We put these people’s lives at risk by not giving them basic necessities. We give them serious, life-changing trauma while insisting they pull themselves up with little help. We treat them like they don’t deserve to live, as dangerous pests that we can uproot at will. If we’re not going to do enough to help them out of their situation and we don’t want them around, what else can we do but kill them? We could put them in some town in the middle of nowhere, but that’s just housing them with extra steps. We give them housing and social services, or don’t complain when they’re on the streets.
Hmm I wouldn’t say left vs right wing is equivalent to some videogame good vs evil slider. Everyone can be selfish, it’s not a ‘right wing’ trait. To enjoy a respite from feeling unsafe, having human defecation on the street, and being yelled at for no particular reason doesn’t make you a sinner.
It is true that left vs right isn’t the same as good or evil. However, the left wing tends to look for non market based solutions, using the government to address issues rather than relying on private interests. Left wingers can be selfish, but right wingers have selfishness explicitly embedded into their ideology of free markets and social Darwinism. Besides, prudent behavior isn’t the same as being selfish. Enjoying negative reinforcement isn’t bad so long as you recognize who applies it and what they want to accomplish.
I personally think a not insignificant amount of encampment dwellers are just people taking advantage of the situation to steal and get high/drunk all day rather than stay clean and work some crappy job to get by, but even I think these sweeps are stupid and a waste of resources as they just shuffle people to other areas rather than accomplish a single thing.
And there is no mention in the article about who ordered and carried out the sweep.
Who cheers about something is secondary to who actually does it. This article doesn’t address who actually did it.
To solve homelessness would mean to completely upend the entire world’s economy and change to a global socialist structure. Homelessness is baked into our economic system. Capitalism is a zero sum game and if we’re going to celebrate having billionaires, we have to celebrate having people live and die on the street.
Capitalism is wired in such a way that productivity literally produces poverty.