It’s a Hooverville revival, now better with pretty sunsets and nearby beaches!
With its homeless problem veering out of control, Hawaii has come up with the wave of the future crashing onto its beaches: build shanty towns on the outskirts of its better neighborhoods, warehousing the homeless in vast communities no one will ever have to see the inside of. Except homeless people! This urban feature is a third world mainstay, with rings of such “communities” around Nairobi, Manila, and Delhi. Now it will be All-American for the first time.
Hawaii is experiencing a 12% growth in the number of unsheltered homeless. Owing to its year-round warm weather, general cool attitude toward overly aggressive enforcement, and plenty of park space, many unhomed people have created tent cities around the islands. Parks on the Windward side, near places like Waianae and Waimanalo are more or less unavailable to homed people just looking for a day in the sun. It can look like this:
Many of these folks will not move into regular shelters. In addition to the crime in those shelters, they do no accommodate families, pets or the large amount of portable refuse many beach dwelling homeless prefer to tote around. In addition, many of the homeless suffer from untreated mental illness and/or serious drug and alcohol problems and don’t “fit in” to the shelter lifestyle.
Hawaii’s answer is to build shanty communities. Sorry, no, not shanties, they will be “tiny houses” without toilets or kitchens. Those “amenities” will be communal, along with tidy gardens for the homeless to tend and meeting places for their book clubs. You can see the illustration, above.
But best of all, according to delusional Hawaii Lieutenant Governor Josh Green, these communities of up to 300 mentally ill homeless drug and alcohol addicts will be self-governing. “The communities would make their own rules,” said Green. “It will be accepting people whether they come with their dogs or if they are in a relationship or single.”
There is no chance these communities could become loci for crime, disease, or sanitation problems. Hawaii has no rabies on the islands, so that’s cool. What could go wrong?
The first community is expected to open in 2020. Next month, leaders from both the city and the state will meet to pick the parcels of land. No doubt the project will be popular enough that nearly ever city in Hawaii will be bidding on the chance to have 300 self-governing homeless people set up shop. Each village is expected to cost between $2 and $5 million which could not possibly be spent better anywhere else.
Protip: in the real third world, most shanty towns are located near the city dump for convenient scavenging. Keep that in mind, Hawaii.
The idea of these government-build shanty towns has come up in Seattle, but it looks like Hawaii is going to implement it first. The shanty idea may or may not be better than something tried in the past, literally flying homeless people out of Hawaii and dumping them on the mainland U.S. of A. Or a 2015 plan to build “tiny homes” out of old shipping containers on an island off Oahu and export the homeless there. Maybe the next idea will be a two-fer: require each already hated AirBNB owner to house a homeless person one week a year as a kind of tax.
So pay attention, America. As the distribution of wealth continues to strangle 99.9% of us, the need for the super-wealthy to get us out of the way will only grow. We’re currently only allowed to live sort of near them as a source of cheap labor and perhaps soylent green. But someday soon enough AI will take care of that and we’ll all be mentally ill and sucking the pipe on a beach somewhere. It’s nice to know they have plans for us.
Aloha!
BONUS: For those unfamiliar with the term, a Hooverville was a shanty town built during the Great Depression by the homeless in the United States (below.) They were named after then-president Herbert Hoover. There were dang near hundreds of Hoovervilles across the country during the 1930s and hundreds of thousands of people lived in these slums. In Steinbeck’s famous The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family briefly settles into a Hooverville in California. So bringing the idea back in modern times is a neat olde timey thing, like Colonial Williamsburg.
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John Poole said...
1Those trucks dispensing a fogged spray to rid the new shanty towns of pesky mosquitos? That chemical cocktail will be formulated to cancel any “results” of all that the energetic tent copulation. Everybody’s happy!
03/15/19 8:59 PM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
2So……………………….? Everyone here is opposed to governmentally discreetly dispensed and dispersed birth control for the poor, homeless and drug induced mentally impaired? None of you have any thoughts?
03/18/19 7:26 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
3JP,
It’s the NCAAs. We got brackets to do.
03/18/19 8:51 PM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
4Damn, I’m two miles from Villanova. Now I understand.
03/18/19 9:42 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
5Villanova, beware of St Mary’s.
Duke looking good.
03/18/19 11:21 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
6Peter should have a WMW NCAA bracket. Winner gets autographed copy of his next book.
03/18/19 11:22 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
7North Philly, South Bronx. Shantytowns, slums, same diff.
03/19/19 7:54 AM | Comment Link
John Poole said...
8All candidates for a federally underwritten water supply free of harmful chemicals or metals and with one proven healthy additive. Again, everybody is happy! Recreational sex for everyone with none of the downsides!
03/19/19 9:46 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
9Actually Peter has nailed it again. If all the poverty people would get on buses and start one giant Hooverville on the Potomac, then maybe they won’t be so ignored by the MSM.
03/20/19 10:58 AM | Comment Link
teri said...
10Putting the homeless in some basic housing is called a “Housing First” policy, and it works. See, for example, Finland. It turns out that giving people the security of a home is the biggest boost to getting them off drugs, into jobs, and on the way back to a normal life. A young (younger than me) friend of mine has been studying the issue of homelessness for years, and the group he works with has found that the housing first approach is the best, hands down. Finland, Denmark, Canada, Australia have implemented the policy with great success. In the US, New York and Connecticut already have communities in operation.
How Finland Solved Homelessness:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/homelessness-finland-housing-first_us_5c503844e4b0f43e410ad8b6
03/21/19 4:24 AM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
11NYC getting too expensive for upper middles
According to a recent National Movers Study conducted by United Van Line—tracking moving company’s customers’ state-to-state relocations—showing more than 61 percent of New York’s movers left the state. Of those, some 41 percent earned $150,000 or more. Comparatively, 8 percent of those who left earned less than $50,000, that study found.
So the Big Apple will only have The very rich and the very poor.
03/21/19 4:51 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
12You can bet Demented Trumpie is trying to make money with his branding on these “starter homes.”
03/22/19 1:11 PM | Comment Link
Rich Bauer said...
13Of course Demented is very busy these days saving Israel.
“Secretary of State Mike Pompeo agreed with a suggestion posed in an interview Thursday that it’s possible God raised Donald Trump to be President in order to protect Israel from Iran.
In an interview in Jerusalem, the Christian Broadcast Network’s Chris Mitchell asked Pompeo, “could it be that President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?” Esther is the main heroine of the Jewish holiday of Purim, which was celebrated this week.
“As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible,” Pompeo said.
Pompeo added that he is “confident that the Lord is at work here” when he sees the “remarkable history of the faith in this place and the work that our administration’s done to make sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this Jewish state, remains.”
When Trumpie chokes on his Big Mac, then maybe.
03/22/19 2:34 PM | Comment Link