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When reading Is Seattle a 15-minute city? this morning, I couldn't help thinking about what's missing from it. For context, the 15-minute city is an urbanist idea about making every residential area a 15-minute walk to important amenities like grocery stores. It's a good idea if it could be achieved without incurring too many other costs, and it's the other costs that I couldn't help thinking about. Specifically, crime.
The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.
I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime. Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals, even if it also screens out some upstanding citizens who cannot or will not drive. Suburbia is the epitome of this phenomenon, where everything is too far from anything else to live without a car. In cities that are naturally denser, there are constant fights over zoning that dance around this issue but don't address it directly (at least when the participants are nominally progressive and need to be seen as non-discriminatory).
There's a more general point here, which is this: discrimination is required for a well-functioning society. I'm using 'discrimination' in the more technical sense here, as "To make a clear distinction; distinguish." The concept of statistical discrimination covers a lot of what I mean here, but discrimination based on signaling is important too.
Statistical discrimination is basically using Bayesian inference, using information that's already available or easy to get, to make inferences about hidden or illegible traits that predict some important outcome. In the context of walkability, people who don't own cars are more likely to commit crimes or to be bad customers and neighbors than people who do own cars. So you end up with a better-behaving local population if you require a car.
By discrimination based on signaling I mean things like choice of clothing, personal affect and mannerism, accent, vocabulary, presence of tattoos, etc. These things are useful for statistical discrimination, but they're under conscious control of the person in question, and they're hard to fake. They basically prove "skin in the game" for group membership. It takes time and effort to develop a convincing persona that will get you accepted into a different social class, and higher social classes have much stricter standards of behavior. Basically the guy speaking in Received Pronunciation, with no tattoos, who uses PMC vocabulary and dresses in upper-middle-class business attire is very unlikely to rob you, because it would be very costly to him. He'd lose his valuable class status for doing something so base.
Why is discrimination required for a well-functioning society? Because every choice is almost by definition discriminatory, and preferentially making positive-sum choices leads to a positive-sum society. Imagine if you made zero assumptions about a new person you met, aside from "this is a human." You wouldn't be able to talk to them (you'd be assuming their language), you wouldn't know what kind of etiquette to use, you'd have no idea whether they're going to kill you for doing something they consider obscene; you wouldn't be able to get any value out of the interaction. If instead you inferred based on their appearance that they're a middle-class elderly American woman who speaks English, you could immediately make good choices about what to talk about with them.
I'm sure this is all pretty obvious to anyone rationalist-adjacent, but I had a confusing conversation with a more left-leaning relative recently who seemed to have internalized a lot of the leftist ideas that are basically of the form "statistical discrimination is useless." Setting aside topics outside the Overton window like HBD, even for questions like "does the fact that a person committed a crime in the past change the likelihood they'll commit a crime in the future, all else equal?" the assumption seemed to be "no." Michael Malice's assertion seems to be true, that answering "are some people better than others" is the most precise way to distinguish right-wing from left-wing.
Bringing this to the culture war, there is a scientific or factual answer to every question "does observable fact X predict outcome Y", and pointing out that leftist assumptions contradict the evidence is how to convince reasonable people that the leftist assumption is false. I'm speaking as a person living in one of the most left-leaning places in the country, so the false leftist assumptions are the ones that most harm my life. Rightist assumptions of course also contradict the evidence, but I don't have salient examples.
The astute observer will note that most of the leftist intellectual movement of the last 50 years is trying to poison the evidence (via ad hominem and other fallacious arguments). How can one improve the quality of evidence when the wills of so many high-status people are set against it?
P.S. I'm sorry for the emotional tone of this post. This community is the only place I have to talk about this and I appreciate your thoughts.
I can't get over how US-centric that discussion is. I live within literally two minutes of a supermarket and it doesn't attract a homeless encampment. Probably because there's nowhere to camp at - if it's in a walkable neighborhood it doesn't have a humongous parking lot around it. I also live within literally two minutes of a metro station, and while its air curtains attract some homeless in winter, they don't go around committing crimes.
You are not giving the homeless enough credit for their willingness to set up camp on sidewalks, door-steps, and gutters even where that blocks the public right-of-way.
Nor are you giving the dysfunction of U.S. legal and governmental structures enough credit: in the western united states enforcement of anti-public-camping ordinances is illegal unless the city can demonstrate that it has an empty homeless-shelter bed for every single homeless person in the area.
Wow. That is a crazy ruling. That's basically holding that society must provide some form of shelter to everyone, either directly or via land-grants at the location of their choice, and it must be situated within city limits. I thought declarations like that were usually constitutional amendments or acts of congress, not court decisions.
As a heartless pragmatist, I would like to point out that the local prison is shelter, and usually has plenty of capacity. There is also a ton of room for innovation in public shelters/public housing: public office space is not used at night which could double as shelters, public parking space could be requisitioned for the contruction of shipping container capsule hotels, and cheap homes could be bought up and partitioned.
In principle the decision isn't completely nonsense. You can't make it impossible for someone to not commit a crime. So if someone doesn't have a home, you can't arrest them for being homeless, since they have no choice but to be homeless.
However, they actually do have a choice--leave the city--especially since many of them were drawn to the city in the first place by homelessness policies. There should also be (but probably isn't) the possibility of arresting them for bad behavior; if there are public restrooms, you should be able to arrest them for urinating on the sidewalk instead of public restrooms, blocking places, aggressively begging, etc. since they do have a choice not to do those things.
There's also the problem that many homeless will refuse to use shelters. If I had to make a more sensible version of this ruling, I'd demand that 1) the city is only required to have a number of beds equal to the number of homeless willing to use them, not the total number of homeless, and 2) if a homeless person refuses to use a bed, or is sent to a bed and later caught outside sleeping on a street, they can be jailed.
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