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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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It should in San Fransico. The city's population is less than in 1950. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23130/san-francisco/population

LA is probably its own beast. But it still holds that the homeless encampments in LA are, mostly, on extremely valuable land. And my suspicion is that if you built a bunch of row houses in Crenshaw that you would not solve the camp situation.

Many camps are on valuable land, no doubt about it ( although some are on sidewalks where you can't build anything and others are under freeway overpasses). Nevertheless, there are no depopulated working class neighborhoods in California, or at least I've never seen any in all my travels through the state.

I've seen people saying this and I guess it is plausible because California has grown so much since the 60s compared to other places with Democrat-dominated metros. There is probably places to put housing in the central valley and the like though. But no one would use it.

The central valley is largely farmland. There are big cities there (Fresno, Bakersfield) and houses are cheaper there but still roughly 400k. There's no empty neighborhoods and those towns are truly shitholes - which goes to show how much demand there is.

Houses in Fresno or in the sticks in the CV?

In Fresno. The sticks in the CV is almond farms.

Yeah! But it could be housing for the homeless! Save water and fix the tents.

You can't even get the farmers to pay for the water they pump out of the earth or build a railroad through their land. A homeless encampment is a complete nonstarter. Not to mention that there'd be nothing for people to do there - no access to jobs or services.

Not to mention that there'd be nothing for people to do there - no access to jobs or services.

That is kind of a feature of the proposal. It shows the problem isn't housing, its lack of force.

Your source is re the SF Metro Area, not the city of SF. And it says that the metro pop was 1.8 million in 1950 and 3.3 million today. As for the city itself, per the Census Bureau, the pop was 775K in 1950 and 875K in 2020.