Boston's project to fill the Back Bay took 50 years to complete. Trains carried gravel from Needham 24 hours a day, arriving every 45 minutes. Real estate sales on the filled land funded the project; overall, the project made enough money to endow Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and Museum of Science.
The profit motive drove public works in the 19th Century, and is missing today.
The major issue in homelessness is not the lack of housing. It's the refusal of society to say no. No, you can't camp in this city. No, you can't shit in the streets. No, you can't panhandle aggressively. No, you can't shoot up publicly and leave your used needles lying around. The fact that we are not going to allow you to destroy our city by doing these things is not our problem. It's your problem. You can solve your problem by not doing drugs, getting help for your mental problems, getting a job, and sharing rent with others so inclined until you can afford a place of your own, probably in a lower cost community.
This is not going to happen because the people we have elected allow the homeless to wallow in their victimhood rather than accept personal responsibility for their self destructiveness.
What specific steps should be taken by cities to deal with the problem? Cities should use all existing shelters and further provide simple shelter space with surplus military tents with mess and recreational tents, a medical tent and restroom and shower facilities (the way I lived in the army) on leased or purchased unused commercial or industrial sites on the outskirts of the city. Hire an ex Army or Marine company First Sergeant to run the operation and ex mess and platoon sergeants as staff. As many homeless who want to and are able to work should be hired to help feed others and to maintain the facilities. Individuals could use surplus military squad tents or their own for sleeping. Residents would be given full freedom to live their lives short of harming others and the use of drugs and alcohol would be tolerated as it is on the streets. When those facilities are available the city should send in crews to clean up existing encampments, without arresting anyone who does not physically resist.
Custodial care should be mandatory for those who are so mentally or drug addicted that they cannot care for themselves. We did a huge disservice to the mentally ill when we closed rather than reform our state mental hospitals. We need them back. This approach actually would cost far less and be far more effective than the current housing first attempts to fix the problem. Most of the homeless lack the capacity to live unassisted in modern society but that is not an excuse to destroy our beautiful cities and drive out our productive citizens.
> Hire an ex Army or Marine company First Sergeant to run the operation and ex mess and platoon sergeants as staff. As many homeless who want to and are able to work should be hired to help feed others and to maintain the facilities.
You can actually go one notch better than this. The problem here is that not a lot of homeless are going to opt into boot camps. This is also going to be hard to get through mostly Blue city governments.
But if instead, you give them what they want somewhere far away from all the productive people, it pays for itself 20 times over.
I'm talking about giving homeless people all the free drugs, alcohol, food, and water they want, out in the desert in BLM land.
I've done the Fermi math on it, and any one of the reduction in crime, the increase in real estate values from usable downtowns, or the reduction in policing pays for it, and cumulatively it pays for itself many times over while still being cheaper than any existing solution.
It's a Pareto improvement - homeless get what they want, we're not being cruel or judging them and are literally passing out everything they want for free for the compassionate and optics-concerned, and our cities get a lot cleaner, lower crime, and more usable.
Performative: I certainly didn’t mean to imply boot camp, but I understand your interpretation. I would actually allow residents complete freedom short of harming others. Specifically, I would not interfere with their use of drugs or alcohol. I will revise my post to reflect this. Thanks.
For an example of how Congress can override the courts, look at the Inflation Reduction Act's green-light of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. In 2022, Senator Joe Manchin of WV was critical of all the lawsuits delaying the pipeline. So he pushed a law to kneecap the 4th federal circuit.
Per Grok:
_____________
Critically, Section 324(e)(1) of the Act stripped jurisdiction from all federal courts to review agency actions granting approvals for the pipeline, explicitly including "any lawsuit pending in a court as of the date of enactment."
_____________
Enviro wackos were aghast that Biden supported this. But Senator Manchin had him cornered.
The pipeline is complete.
Note that the "co-equal" pimping of the 3 branches of government needs to end.
Congress is supreme.
Congress can impeach the president and federal judges.
Congress can re-organize federal courts.
Congress can dilute authority of courts by adding judges.
Congress, and state legislatures where appropriate, needs to step up and give the judiciary an appropriate beat-down.
This was great, and deliciously snarky. But, I have to ask, is this just satire? Is the real lesson here is that we should make peace with the disorder and decay of the welfare state, or opt for pie-in-the-sky libertarianism and build our cabins in the woods to smoke our weed and hoard our guns?
And weren’t you whining (or mewing since you’re a baby cat) about your kids getting bullied by leftist youths who’ve been taught to make everything political? How can such a person now push mini-fascism? Is this genuine, or is it bait for us dumb conservatives and rightists, only to be punked and embarrassed for not being in on the joke?
The geriatrics waving signs are in many cases the same elves who built that infrastructure. The same thing that gets them out on the street in their old age is also what got them up into tall buildings and out pushing asphalt onto the highways when they were younger. If you really want to know what’s wrong with our society, think about the fact that in their old age *they’re still doing things* while all you’re able to produce is snarky Substack posts full of incoherent ideology demanding more executive power (but not Executive power because of course you’ve figured out that this is bad, and excluding one edge case naturally fixes every broken system.)
Not really, that was their parents and grandparents. They inherited it without having to work for it, which is why they act entitled to it and everyone hates them.
Also the idea that waving a sign on a street corner is "doing something" akin to building the golden gate bridge is maybe the most boomer sentiment I've ever heard, did a boomer write this comment?
My dad was born in ‘42 and one of his formative memories is of a dead sailor washing up on the beach of Coney Island in a flood of castor beans, because U-boats were torpedoing merchant shipping off NY harbor. He didn’t work in construction but he did work on ocean liners, and (more relevant to this conversation) was very much at working age in the years 1956-1972 when most of the Interstate Highway system was built. An uncle (by marriage) was involved in constructing the first World Trade Center, which was constructed between 1968-73. A few other noteworthy structures that were built between 1962 and (say) 1990:
* The Sears Tower
* NYC water tunnel No. 3
* The Verrazano Narrows bridge
* The Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels
* The Chesapeake Bay Bridge
Lots of other examples. Everything looked very different before that generation (now in their 80s) built out our country. Given that it’s damned hard to stand in the cold in your 80s when you’ve got Parkinson’s, and most of us younger folks aren’t doing squat, I tend to listen to them when they tell us our current leadership isn’t up to the quality of the leaders they worked under.
Yes they're my parents too and I love them, but what you're describing are Greatest / Silent generation projects that the boomers ran across the finish line. Credit where it's due: yes they laid asphalt. But no, these weren't their initiatives at the planning and institutional level, which is the point of this essay.
And unless you're willing to also sit your ass down and listen when they're wearing tea bags from their hat brims or waving signs about how Biden has been replaced by an android then spare me.
I'm not sure what your thesis is. What precisely do you think was great about that generation, that made them so capable? The closest I can see is that they took their good-government very seriously (as did their children), and worked hard to make sure it was both (1) trustworthy and law-abiding, and (2) had enough state capacity that things could get done. The lack of trust is exactly why you see those elderly people standing in the street protesting the current government.
I suppose one can squint and look at your "1000 mini-Mussolinis" proposal and see it as an unserious call for proposition (2). But it will never be successful without some ability to vote for and defend a trustworthy democratic government. The fact that your major concern in life is making fun of senior citizens *who are literally calling for the government to obey the law* tells me that you don't have what it takes to build a society like the one our forefathers lived in.
I love this quite common line of thinking where lack of trust is the prime mover.
Things just worked really, really well, the government was lawful but effective, but then people lost trust – they just lost it, ok???? – and now things suck.
We have to restore trust in the institutions! How? Well people need to trust the institutions again, for no particular reason, just like they presumably lost that trust.
I don’t think these things are uncorrelated at all. When you have political candidates telling you not to trust the government, and also reducing state capacity when they get in power, you’re going to see a combination of less trust and less state power. What’s the question here?
The answer is not “just trust the institutions”: it’s “elect candidates who are trustworthy and who themselves aren’t trying to sabotage the government.”
Ironically, the 1920s-1980s was when progressives and communists and unions were an actual force in US politics. I don't think anyone has really connected the right-wing turn under Reagan with the collapse of our ability to build things.
I mean, the era of “we can’t build anything” collides almost perfectly with the Reagan years. Environmental laws from the 70s explain some of it, but financialization and loss of state power probably do a lot of the heavy lifting. It’s not like modern Western Europe is an environmental disaster area, and they can bang out new high-speed rail like it’s nothing.
No, he didn't. Either you're lying or he was. The war ended in 45. You're telling me a 2 year old has "formative memories" of a dead body washing up on the beach?
I have memories from when I was two years old, and mine don’t involve dead bodies, which would be hella more traumatic. It’s a pretty normal time to start forming your first fragmentary memories.
Weird how it's places where communists or socialists are in power that still know how, but in places that went hard capitalist we're spending more and more money for less and less result, huh?
Your point about judicial overstepping is great. I write to point out that the founders anticipated this in designing the structure.
Here’s Hamilton: “[The judiciary] may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”
The implication of this being that it is ultimately the President who is acquiescing by enforcing court judgments. We have a structural check that requires no new legislation, but merely executive willpower.
“And besides, the size of the women’s marches in protest would devastate the erotic werewolf novel industry…” And there went my coffee this morning, thanks.
Who’s going to bell the cat? This essay is the start of a PhD thesis on Public Policy—and unfortunately devoid of reality, since there is no way for a “Duke” or “Dictator” to enforce anything without absolute power. People would get the idea quickly, but there will have to be examples made. “Do it my way or you will be shot!” Wouldn’t take but one or two.
It's LITTLE A, not A LITTLE. that's the joke! The cat doesn't know grammar, because it's a feline ignoramus, it just knows it wants cured meats! LITTLE A SALAMI!!!!
I'm sure your essay was very good as well; i regret to advise i have not read it, and do not intend to
This is the best Poast I've read in an agonizingly long time. I mean the Shakespearean brilliance of, "These are serious proposals, not jokes ... Except for the ones that you find personally offensive and beyond the pale. Those ones are jokes, but the rest of them are serious."(!!!) Chef's kiss 💋 You should win on style alone.
The issue is that it's easy to get the upper middle class on board with repressing others or increasing their own power- that's how we got the largest prison population in the world and NIMBYs. It's very hard to get them on board for stuff that would impact them: expropriation without recourse to speed and smooth public construction, higher taxes to pay for psych institutions located near their properties, cops that go after wage theft and embezzlement as hard as they do stealing shampoo.
It would be good to have more executive power, if it was exercised to resolve the that are problems for the bottom 60%. But the people who usually support facism would scream because they want their interests upheld, not the interests of the commonweal.
Boston's project to fill the Back Bay took 50 years to complete. Trains carried gravel from Needham 24 hours a day, arriving every 45 minutes. Real estate sales on the filled land funded the project; overall, the project made enough money to endow Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and Museum of Science.
The profit motive drove public works in the 19th Century, and is missing today.
Sounds like fascism to me Thomas
Eek why would anyone want to fill a bay! I’d support an executive order to put it back.
And then the next guy would just fill it right back in again
Not if there is as a surgical, decisive program to fill the whole place with deer flies, hehehe
Digging holes and filling them back in does famously increase GDP...
Thanks Thomas, great info they should add to the Duck Boat Tour 🦆in Boston
Toronto recently took nearly a decade to install speedbumps near a school zone.
Based and RobertMosesPilled
I think about him the way some guys think about the Roman empire
Is that Jane Jacobs I see, Smiling Beneficently from Above?
The major issue in homelessness is not the lack of housing. It's the refusal of society to say no. No, you can't camp in this city. No, you can't shit in the streets. No, you can't panhandle aggressively. No, you can't shoot up publicly and leave your used needles lying around. The fact that we are not going to allow you to destroy our city by doing these things is not our problem. It's your problem. You can solve your problem by not doing drugs, getting help for your mental problems, getting a job, and sharing rent with others so inclined until you can afford a place of your own, probably in a lower cost community.
This is not going to happen because the people we have elected allow the homeless to wallow in their victimhood rather than accept personal responsibility for their self destructiveness.
What specific steps should be taken by cities to deal with the problem? Cities should use all existing shelters and further provide simple shelter space with surplus military tents with mess and recreational tents, a medical tent and restroom and shower facilities (the way I lived in the army) on leased or purchased unused commercial or industrial sites on the outskirts of the city. Hire an ex Army or Marine company First Sergeant to run the operation and ex mess and platoon sergeants as staff. As many homeless who want to and are able to work should be hired to help feed others and to maintain the facilities. Individuals could use surplus military squad tents or their own for sleeping. Residents would be given full freedom to live their lives short of harming others and the use of drugs and alcohol would be tolerated as it is on the streets. When those facilities are available the city should send in crews to clean up existing encampments, without arresting anyone who does not physically resist.
Custodial care should be mandatory for those who are so mentally or drug addicted that they cannot care for themselves. We did a huge disservice to the mentally ill when we closed rather than reform our state mental hospitals. We need them back. This approach actually would cost far less and be far more effective than the current housing first attempts to fix the problem. Most of the homeless lack the capacity to live unassisted in modern society but that is not an excuse to destroy our beautiful cities and drive out our productive citizens.
> Hire an ex Army or Marine company First Sergeant to run the operation and ex mess and platoon sergeants as staff. As many homeless who want to and are able to work should be hired to help feed others and to maintain the facilities.
You can actually go one notch better than this. The problem here is that not a lot of homeless are going to opt into boot camps. This is also going to be hard to get through mostly Blue city governments.
But if instead, you give them what they want somewhere far away from all the productive people, it pays for itself 20 times over.
I'm talking about giving homeless people all the free drugs, alcohol, food, and water they want, out in the desert in BLM land.
I've done the Fermi math on it, and any one of the reduction in crime, the increase in real estate values from usable downtowns, or the reduction in policing pays for it, and cumulatively it pays for itself many times over while still being cheaper than any existing solution.
It's a Pareto improvement - homeless get what they want, we're not being cruel or judging them and are literally passing out everything they want for free for the compassionate and optics-concerned, and our cities get a lot cleaner, lower crime, and more usable.
I detail it all in my post here.
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/an-incentives-based-problem-homeless?r=17hw9h
Performative: I certainly didn’t mean to imply boot camp, but I understand your interpretation. I would actually allow residents complete freedom short of harming others. Specifically, I would not interfere with their use of drugs or alcohol. I will revise my post to reflect this. Thanks.
The bums will not go because they know they will not have a host population there to leech off of
For an example of how Congress can override the courts, look at the Inflation Reduction Act's green-light of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. In 2022, Senator Joe Manchin of WV was critical of all the lawsuits delaying the pipeline. So he pushed a law to kneecap the 4th federal circuit.
Per Grok:
_____________
Critically, Section 324(e)(1) of the Act stripped jurisdiction from all federal courts to review agency actions granting approvals for the pipeline, explicitly including "any lawsuit pending in a court as of the date of enactment."
_____________
Enviro wackos were aghast that Biden supported this. But Senator Manchin had him cornered.
The pipeline is complete.
Note that the "co-equal" pimping of the 3 branches of government needs to end.
Congress is supreme.
Congress can impeach the president and federal judges.
Congress can re-organize federal courts.
Congress can dilute authority of courts by adding judges.
Congress, and state legislatures where appropriate, needs to step up and give the judiciary an appropriate beat-down.
Good essay. Best of luck in the contest! I meant to write one too, but I forgot.
You have 4 and 1/2 hours, get to work
I think I came in under time. Thanks for the deadline, lol
Alright.
This was great, and deliciously snarky. But, I have to ask, is this just satire? Is the real lesson here is that we should make peace with the disorder and decay of the welfare state, or opt for pie-in-the-sky libertarianism and build our cabins in the woods to smoke our weed and hoard our guns?
And weren’t you whining (or mewing since you’re a baby cat) about your kids getting bullied by leftist youths who’ve been taught to make everything political? How can such a person now push mini-fascism? Is this genuine, or is it bait for us dumb conservatives and rightists, only to be punked and embarrassed for not being in on the joke?
What's the deadline on this?
Midnight eastern time.
Good luck Kit. I like your style.
🫡
Frankly I would have left the Muss reference out as that's just a blatant finger but hey. it's not my essay.
We have a little fun here
The geriatrics waving signs are in many cases the same elves who built that infrastructure. The same thing that gets them out on the street in their old age is also what got them up into tall buildings and out pushing asphalt onto the highways when they were younger. If you really want to know what’s wrong with our society, think about the fact that in their old age *they’re still doing things* while all you’re able to produce is snarky Substack posts full of incoherent ideology demanding more executive power (but not Executive power because of course you’ve figured out that this is bad, and excluding one edge case naturally fixes every broken system.)
Not really, that was their parents and grandparents. They inherited it without having to work for it, which is why they act entitled to it and everyone hates them.
Also the idea that waving a sign on a street corner is "doing something" akin to building the golden gate bridge is maybe the most boomer sentiment I've ever heard, did a boomer write this comment?
My dad was born in ‘42 and one of his formative memories is of a dead sailor washing up on the beach of Coney Island in a flood of castor beans, because U-boats were torpedoing merchant shipping off NY harbor. He didn’t work in construction but he did work on ocean liners, and (more relevant to this conversation) was very much at working age in the years 1956-1972 when most of the Interstate Highway system was built. An uncle (by marriage) was involved in constructing the first World Trade Center, which was constructed between 1968-73. A few other noteworthy structures that were built between 1962 and (say) 1990:
* The Sears Tower
* NYC water tunnel No. 3
* The Verrazano Narrows bridge
* The Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels
* The Chesapeake Bay Bridge
Lots of other examples. Everything looked very different before that generation (now in their 80s) built out our country. Given that it’s damned hard to stand in the cold in your 80s when you’ve got Parkinson’s, and most of us younger folks aren’t doing squat, I tend to listen to them when they tell us our current leadership isn’t up to the quality of the leaders they worked under.
Yes they're my parents too and I love them, but what you're describing are Greatest / Silent generation projects that the boomers ran across the finish line. Credit where it's due: yes they laid asphalt. But no, these weren't their initiatives at the planning and institutional level, which is the point of this essay.
And unless you're willing to also sit your ass down and listen when they're wearing tea bags from their hat brims or waving signs about how Biden has been replaced by an android then spare me.
I'm not sure what your thesis is. What precisely do you think was great about that generation, that made them so capable? The closest I can see is that they took their good-government very seriously (as did their children), and worked hard to make sure it was both (1) trustworthy and law-abiding, and (2) had enough state capacity that things could get done. The lack of trust is exactly why you see those elderly people standing in the street protesting the current government.
I suppose one can squint and look at your "1000 mini-Mussolinis" proposal and see it as an unserious call for proposition (2). But it will never be successful without some ability to vote for and defend a trustworthy democratic government. The fact that your major concern in life is making fun of senior citizens *who are literally calling for the government to obey the law* tells me that you don't have what it takes to build a society like the one our forefathers lived in.
I love this quite common line of thinking where lack of trust is the prime mover.
Things just worked really, really well, the government was lawful but effective, but then people lost trust – they just lost it, ok???? – and now things suck.
We have to restore trust in the institutions! How? Well people need to trust the institutions again, for no particular reason, just like they presumably lost that trust.
Mental.
I don’t think these things are uncorrelated at all. When you have political candidates telling you not to trust the government, and also reducing state capacity when they get in power, you’re going to see a combination of less trust and less state power. What’s the question here?
The answer is not “just trust the institutions”: it’s “elect candidates who are trustworthy and who themselves aren’t trying to sabotage the government.”
Ironically, the 1920s-1980s was when progressives and communists and unions were an actual force in US politics. I don't think anyone has really connected the right-wing turn under Reagan with the collapse of our ability to build things.
I mean, the era of “we can’t build anything” collides almost perfectly with the Reagan years. Environmental laws from the 70s explain some of it, but financialization and loss of state power probably do a lot of the heavy lifting. It’s not like modern Western Europe is an environmental disaster area, and they can bang out new high-speed rail like it’s nothing.
No, he didn't. Either you're lying or he was. The war ended in 45. You're telling me a 2 year old has "formative memories" of a dead body washing up on the beach?
I have memories from when I was two years old, and mine don’t involve dead bodies, which would be hella more traumatic. It’s a pretty normal time to start forming your first fragmentary memories.
The Chinese still know how.
Weird how it's places where communists or socialists are in power that still know how, but in places that went hard capitalist we're spending more and more money for less and less result, huh?
Your point about judicial overstepping is great. I write to point out that the founders anticipated this in designing the structure.
Here’s Hamilton: “[The judiciary] may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”
The implication of this being that it is ultimately the President who is acquiescing by enforcing court judgments. We have a structural check that requires no new legislation, but merely executive willpower.
“And besides, the size of the women’s marches in protest would devastate the erotic werewolf novel industry…” And there went my coffee this morning, thanks.
Who’s going to bell the cat? This essay is the start of a PhD thesis on Public Policy—and unfortunately devoid of reality, since there is no way for a “Duke” or “Dictator” to enforce anything without absolute power. People would get the idea quickly, but there will have to be examples made. “Do it my way or you will be shot!” Wouldn’t take but one or two.
It's LITTLE A, not A LITTLE. that's the joke! The cat doesn't know grammar, because it's a feline ignoramus, it just knows it wants cured meats! LITTLE A SALAMI!!!!
I'm sure your essay was very good as well; i regret to advise i have not read it, and do not intend to
This is the best Poast I've read in an agonizingly long time. I mean the Shakespearean brilliance of, "These are serious proposals, not jokes ... Except for the ones that you find personally offensive and beyond the pale. Those ones are jokes, but the rest of them are serious."(!!!) Chef's kiss 💋 You should win on style alone.
Thank you I concur
The issue is that it's easy to get the upper middle class on board with repressing others or increasing their own power- that's how we got the largest prison population in the world and NIMBYs. It's very hard to get them on board for stuff that would impact them: expropriation without recourse to speed and smooth public construction, higher taxes to pay for psych institutions located near their properties, cops that go after wage theft and embezzlement as hard as they do stealing shampoo.
It would be good to have more executive power, if it was exercised to resolve the that are problems for the bottom 60%. But the people who usually support facism would scream because they want their interests upheld, not the interests of the commonweal.
I thought the US didn’t want the trains?