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Originally Posted by AuburnAL
Different tolerances for the problem. Send them to some city with a high tolerance for the homeless.
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This is based on the assumption that cities with lots of homeless people have them because the city welcomes their presence. This is a fallacy.
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Or they go to some other city that does provide low income housing.
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This is based on a similar fallacy assumption. Cities take steps to provide low-income housing in response to need.
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Sorry I don't consider sewers to be a social service, and I can't recall anywhere where people other than the homeless were getting fed by the city. Even then it is usually private groups and not the government running the soup kitchen. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're talking about.
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Public or private, the largest social services tend to set up in cities, while if there are any facilities in the suburbs they tend to be satellite offices, small in size and scale, that mostly refer people downtown. The end result tends to be a pattern that keeps the poor and needy flowing towards downtown (or, more recently, towards older residential suburbs in decay) and away from the favored quarter of residential suburbs.
Free-breakfast and school lunch programs, food stamps and WIC are all examples of government programs that feed people, often people who are not homeless.
Sewers were part of a greater move for public sanitation, but yes, you are misunderstanding what I'm talking about--even suburbs provide sewers.
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A little bit worse. Most places people don't seem to ride public transportation in large numbers anyways.
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Maybe you don't ride public transit and haven't seen it, but even in cities without a lot of public transit, it is busy at rush hour. And if a bus holds 50 people, one bus means 50 cars not on the street during the peak time when 50 cars can make a big difference.
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Seems to work pretty well for suburbs doesn't it?
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It does, because it is based on making someone else clean up your own messes. It's passing the buck, not taking responsibility.
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Please. It was voting not welfare that kept the US from having some uprising of the poor. That's what all those revolting the 1840s in Europe wanted. You can put that sort of thinking aside. Even Marx would repudiate himself on this if he was alive today.
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Look at the history of the 20th century, not the 19th--the authoritarian regimes in Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain and China did not take power based on promises of democracy (none of them let people vote)--they were in response to poverty, economic inequality and hunger. The United States chose a different path, and while there were both communist (and fascist) groups in the United States who wanted to follow the path of Russia (or Italy and Germany), they never took hold--the institutions of democracy were too strong, American people were not hungry enough to revolt en masse because we actually made an effort to feed our people. But that's a historical aside best continued elsewhere.
The point is that American societies have problems that need solving, and traditionally the suburban solution is to physically move those problems physically away from the middle class and pretend they are solved, then blame cities for not being able to shoulder the suburbs' problems.
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