The camps are managed by Urban Alchemy, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that has rapidly grown into a multimillion-dollar street services enterprise and embodies an elastic philosophy of shelter.
Aggressive marketing aligned with rising public discontent over homelessness made for a winning strategy. By 2021 it reported $51 million in revenue primarily from contracts for street outreach and shelter operations in San Francisco; Austin, Texas; Portland, Ore.; and Los Angeles.
So, this is it, huh?
We went from putting people on the moon with a fucking pocket calculator for a computer to “Idk, what if we just put the tents in nice, neat grids?” That’s really the best we can do?
Yo, anyone care to chime in on why the US is seemingly addicted to only engaging with stupid solutions?
Real solutions would involve changing society somewhat and we can’t do that.
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far more capital can be accumulated in managing a problem than from solving a problem.
additionally, providing for a basic level of dignified existence to all people would undermine employers’ power over workers. i.e. the Reserve Army of Labor / “Why The Extremely Wealthy US Doesn’t Have Universal Healthcare?”
Slam dunk of an answer right here
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Real solutions can be appraised and given a realistic cost or profit potential. Made up dumb nonsense is better for a world that is fully financialized because the people who are supposed to make money have a monopoly on the ‘information’ and control the inputs enough that they can abandon their house of cards at exactly the right time to extract the maximum wealth and leave the public holding the bag.
Good solutions cost more, this one they get to have 44k per tent (and pocket probably 40k)
Happiness, rejuvenation and prosperity for all are illegal in the US, and more increasingly in the West.
Those achievements in space you spoke of, by the way, were driven by the US’ need to save the legitimacy of capitalism in opposition to the Soviet Union and socialism. They only ever try to achieve anything when dual-power threatens to expose the liberal order as illegitimate, inevitably resulting in the revoking of all rights, dignity, and life itself to the global population. In this case, dual-power is not only exposing but also usurping the liberal order as the only sensible way forward (multipolarity and socialism in the pursuit of communism).
The US is now de-industrialized and cannot possibly run it back (collapsing the Soviet Union) for China’s unstoppable rise as the most advanced industrial power globally, since the social and material conditions no-longer exist to pull it off.
The US, along with capitalism and the practice of liberalism is on its way out the door and this is just them grabbing everything they can in the process. Expect these tent situations to eventually be reduced to sleeping bags and towels in the interest of exploring this so-called “elastic philosophy of shelter”. Who knows, maybe they’ll even go as far as to masturbate the idea of minimalism and mind over matter to get rid of even those further reduced accommodations.
It’s not so much that the solutions are stupid, it’s that they are in direct conflict and contradiction to the interests of the working class.
See this post here: What is Class Conflict? Karl Marx’s Class Struggle Explained: Proletariat vs Bourgeoisie