Tangent Writes

This is a Learning in Progress post. Contents are brief thoughts based on few sources, and have not been fully checked for accuracy.

Observing propaganda is useful to see how it is constructed. I just got through watching a video that claimed California is being taken over by “the drug-addled violent homeless”¹ due to decriminalization of felonies and stringent building codes. In case you need the reminder: Homeless people are victims of landlords, a lack of rent control², and a lack of social services. And the felonies in question? Minor crimes like drug possession and petty theft, the kinds of crime done by the desperate or disadvantaged. In other wods, crimes that never should have been a felony in the first place.

(They also claim that providing medical services to drug users increases harm. I remind you that the purpose of medicine is to reduce harm.)

California’s population peaked in 2020 at 39.5 million people³. At the time, there were approximately 151,000 homeless people living there⁴, and 711,679 housing units were unoccupied⁵ – enough for every homeless person to have 4 homes! (This mirrors a larger trend in the USA, where there were 16,883,357 vacant housing units in 2019⁶, and 1.5 million homeless people⁷.) By 2022, California’s population had dropped by 0.5 million and there were 2.4 million more housing units (from 12.2 million⁵ to 14.6 million)⁸, which is plenty more space, despite the increase in homeless population to ~181,000 people⁹.

A preliminary estimate shows the homeless population in California has grown by 2% since that figure, which still doesn’t strain the available housing units¹⁰. However, the source of that claim is one of the least reliable sources available, so the real difference may be higher.

Underreporting & Accuracy

The USA has always had very reliable census data. The numbers regarding housing units all come from census data, and are accurate. The information on homeless populations that I found broadly comes from 3 categories of sources, with varrying levels of accuracy.

1. “Continuum of Care” sources (commonly abbreviated CoC) seem to be the least reliable, first because they count homeless people at a single point of time (which ignores the magnitude of homelessness by omitting people who are frequently homeless for brief periods of time repeatedly), and second because they only count homeless people participating in a homelessness preventation program (which are often highly exclusionary, tunring away most homeless people). For example, the HUD’s CoC sources claim that in 2019 there were only 279,327 homeless people¹¹ in the entire country instead of the 1.5 million⁷ I stated above.
2. The Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) seems to still fall into the trap of only counting people at a single point in time, but as far as I can tell actually does try to come up with an accurate count at that moment in time. The 9th and 11th items in my footnotes/sources are these reports, whose numbers are close to the PIT estimate in the 7th item (so I consider them related / roughly equivalent in accuracy).
3. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) only counts homelessness based on children during a school year. Despite this, it captures a much more realistic estimate of the magnitude of homelessness by accounting for families over a significant period of time.

It would be fair to take these sources as a lower bound, average estimate, and upper bound. Operating from that assumption, I note that the difference between the lowest estimates and the highest is about 5x, while the difference between the average and upper is 3x. I think it important to consider this when looking at the numbers presented earlier, specifically the comparison between California and the whole USA.

There Were Always Enough Homes

When I want to make a point clear, I take the estimates most against my position, and use those to prove my perspective valid even under a worst-case.

California has 1/3rd the homeless population of the entire country. The estimates I found for California match the average estimates for the USA. If we assume that the average estimate is wrong, and the upper bound is correct, there are 3x more homeless people in California than I said above.

In 2019, the highest count I found was 181,000. If we presume that there are actually 543,000 homeless people, that the 2.4 million new housing units don’t actually exist, and that 500,000 people didn’t actually leave California… there are still 711,679 housing units available for them. There have always been enough homes for everyone.

Footnotes & Sources

1. An important signifier in any conversion about disadvantaged people is how they are spoken about. A specific flag to look for is the usage of terms like “the homeless” vs terms like “homeless people”. The first is dehumanizing, the focus is on a group of “disliked things” whereas the second acknowledges these are people of a categorization. While this language usage does not necessarily coincide with how a presenter values the people being discussed, it is a hint at how they perceive of a topic.
2. There are a billion sources that all show this. I just happened across a really detailed document about ALL of this in State of Homelessness: 2024 Edition (archived)
3. California Remained Most Populous State but Growth Slowed Last Decade (archived)
4. Page 3 of Homelessness in California (archived)
5. California Housing Statistics (archived)
6. Housing Units and Population Measures for the United States (archived)
7. Urban Vision Alliances’ HOMELESSNESS STATISTICS (archived)
8. California – Profile data – Census Reporter (archived)
9. Page 186 (printed as pg. 16) of The 2023 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress (archived)
10. Partial 2024 California Homeless Count Results Reveal a Statewide Increase of 2% (archived)
11. HUD 2019 Continuum of Care Homeless Assistance Programs Homeless Populations and Subpopulations (wouldn’t archive)

This is a Learning in Progress post. Contents are brief thoughts based on few sources, and have not been checked for accuracy or usefulness.

These notes are based on a section of Equality by Darrin M. McMahon. I haven’t finished reading it, and a bug deleted most of my notes from the first ~200 pages, so it is even less complete than it might otherwise be.

People are different, and this makes them inherently unequal. This has been used to justify bigotry on arbitrary differences throughout history, but declaring equality of all doesn’t make people equal either. Everyone has needs and capabilities, and the only path to equality is to have all people use their capabilities collectively to fulfill their collective needs.

Stalinism took “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” and replaced the word “need” with “work”. By including this seed of meritocracy, anyone injured, disabled, or elderly is excluded from equality. (I think every person has a phase where they see meritocracy as ideal. Fortunately, most people grow out of this phase.)

Nazis promoted equality of a few at the expense of everyone else. (How equality has been used throughout history changes. It is important to recognize that it means different things to different people.) Fascism creates a meritocracy exclusive to one class, relying on the existence of outsiders (who must be murdered¹). In this way, fascism must shrink the accepted class to have more outsiders, and eats itself.

We claim all nations are equal, while propping up some, sabotaging others, and we can all see that nations are not equal. WWII’s devastation increased equality (see “four horseman of leveling” in Quotes). Post-WWII, economists claimed that industrialization forms a natural progression of brief extreme inequality that quickly brings in equality. (This is an obvious lie.) At the same time, economists claimed that it was better to make a nation wealthy than to fix its inequality, and that commerce is a leveling force. “When a rich man sells to the poor, they become equal.” cannot be true, and yet it was the predominant claim.

Quotes

• “self-love is the great barrier to full human equality” I see in many people, especially myself, a critical lack of self-love, so this stood out to me as worth investigating further. It may not be true, or it may be more true than I am capable of recognizing right now.
• “Christianity is Communism” If you research when and where Christianity was formed, the people were living under a form of communism.² The ideals of Christianity are communist ideals, but have been changed and replaced by centuries of adaptation and interpretation.
• “iron law of oligarchy” In every government, an elite few control all. There are many systems to stop this, but they have all failed so far.
• “four horseman of leveling” – war, revolution, state failure, disease. These are all common things that have caused increases in equality by hurting everyone.

Questions

• Does communism only work at small scales? It is implied to have only worked when implemented by communities instead of countries.
• Does Marxism rely on individualism? The more I learn, the more I see that individualism is the biggest threat to progress. (Ever heard “divide and conquer”? Individualism IS self-division – a destruction of community. It makes us weak.)
• What makes immigration “good”?³ From my education, I “know” that immigration has always had benefits, but what are those benefits? Why do we call them beneficial? As far as I know, the benefit has always been cheap labor (exploitation of immigrants). I want to challenge my education, and learn more about the complexities of immigration. (There is never a valid reason to stop immigration.)
• Should we not want greatness? What IS greatness? Nietzsche argued for a constant personal struggle to achieve greatness, and against many institutions that improve equality. If seeking greatness requires sacrificing others, should we ever want it?
• What was good/bad about the “New Deals”? They compensated for a destroyed economy, and produced infrastructure still used today, but what were the exact short-term and long-term effects?

Further Reading

• Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx

Footnotes

1. Fascism relies on exploitation of the unaccepted classes, which often literally involves mass murder, but also makes the unaccepted people leave. This is why fascists inevitably shrink their accepted class.
2. Romans were the capitalists of their day, exploiting the people that became the first Christians. Communism is a broad and complex subject. In this context, communism is being used unrelated to the way it is used as a classification for modern countries.
3. A partner reminds me that diversity is an inherent good, and that immigration increases diversity. (At minimum, diversity brings new ideas and perspectives into focus, and increases resiliency.)

(It’s kind of difficult to keep motivation when hard work is unceremoniously destroyed by a glitch..)