"By that, I mean the extreme right believes in NIMBYism — not in my back yard. We'll shove all our problems into downtown LA and come down once a month and throw food and clothes at them and feel good about ourselves. And then the extreme left truly believes that because they're poor, black, Hispanic, whatever, because they're of poorer socioeconomic status, that we as law enforcement should just leave them alone. They really believe we should be hands off. And those two ideologies created what we're dealing with on Skid Row."
Said Deon Joseph, quoted in CNN's "On patrol with Skid Row's 'angel cop."
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NIMBYism is a right-wing phenomenon?
Since when?
Tim Maguire beat me to it. The majority of the environmental movement is NIMBYism of the left.
Wait, doesn't Madonna have a charity to deal with this? Rita Wilson?
Yeah, unless you are Mother Theresa, NIMBYism is pretty much the human default position. Perhaps the cop was going for "bootstrapping" or some such and it just didn't come out right.
Like, all those in S.F. who voted in an ordinance which forbids panhandlers from staking out/claiming sections of the sidewalk to sit on in front of stores in order to panhandle are all conservative Republicans, right?
NIMBYism is an unfair epithet. Everybody wants a nice neighborhood and having a nice neighborhood means not having certain things every decent-sized community needs. Only one neighborhood is going to have the methadone clinic, only one neighborhood is going to have the waste disposal plant. Is it reasonable to expect some civic group to volunteer to host the homeless shelter? No, and that is why they tend to go into the neighborhoods with the least clout.
NIMBYism is not a bad thing, it is simply a thing, a reality.
So this idiot cop universalizes a personal experience--maybe his rich neighborhoods are right wing. Not a big deal.
The real failure is in failing to recognize an obvious fact--the left and the right have the same ultimate goal. Both want to minimize the effects of poverty. The right wants to do it by making fewer poor people, the left wants to do it by setting minimum standards for access to property and services regardless of ability to pay.
The left thinks the right is evil because it assumes the right doesn't care about the poor. The right thinks the left is stupid because it doesn't understand how you beat poverty.
give the guy a break. 20 years as a beat cop patrolling one of the most blighted sections of LA? so he's not much of a political analyst, but i respect what he has done.
Yeah, my initial reaction was also surprise to learn that NIMBY was a right-wing phenomenon.
The majority of the chronically homeless have mental issues and would have been committed to a mental institution in an earlier era.
That is no longer done because of a sea-change in how we view mental illness as it relates to basic rights, fueled by exposes about just how horrific those mental institutions were.
So we have a large population of people who are unable to function well in society but who are not dangerous to themselves or others who, quite rationally, go where food and shelter is available, in shelters ran by people both on the left and right of the political spectrum.
Locating those shelters in a centralized location would seem to be a reasonable action from a logistical point of view.
A lot of hard right folks in LA? Are those the ones not driving Priuses?
Also, is attempting to help the homeless only allowed if you make a full time career out of it and you feel bad about yourself?
My church has partnered with several others to help support a homeless shelter. Is that wrong somehow?
Are extremists in California more unhinged than those in other parts of the country? Neither of those characterizations seems very accurate to me -- although perhaps I have been somewhat sheltered by living near DC.
Meanwhile, what were all the moderates doing while he thought the extremists were making Skid Row? Sitting back, thinking that they didn't need to take action (or maybe even a position) because someone else was claiming to do that for them?
Can't blame the cop. Attributing a problem to the left without a counterbalancing blast at the right would lead to an immediate rejection of his opinion.
I read the CNN piece and the errors and misconceptions are legion.
So, for instance, the author describes person after person with demonstrable mental illness sufficient to prevent daily life without some intervention, but then says "What Skid Row needs, they say, is affordable housing -- and lots of it"
Or "it's time to stop playing politics with Skid Row" but of course, the thrust of the article? Rich land barons moving the poor out of their homes? What about the squalid conditions deriving from, as pointed out by Ralph above, the 1970's liberal drive to assign self-determination to the mentally ill.
"Other parts of the city, they say, need to step up and share responsibility." Good idea, let's disperse the homeless assistance across the county, add to public transportation use at the same time.
"We have beer barons selling singles for $2, right outside AA meetings."He has arrested one of the more notorious beer barons several times...CNN makes this sound like a positive. Is that like arresting a guy for selling single cigarettes? Oh, wait....
This article is like a textbook argument for the broken window theory of urban policing.
RuyDiaz said...
Tim Maguire beat me to it. The majority of the environmental movement is NIMBYism of the left.
The more extreme elements are way beyond NIMBY. They're DBAAW - Don't Built Anything Anywhere.
... I feel like a terrible human being, but all I can think of is Rick Moranis and ... Ellen Greene, I think? ... singing in Little Shop of Horrors?
"By that, I mean the extreme right believes in NIMBYism — not in my back yard."
Hmm. Point of information, out here on the east coast NIMBYism is notably a phenomenon of the limousine liberal. Perhaps it's different out on the left coast.
The quote was inexact. Both the left and the Right practice NIMBYism, but he Right at least shows up once a month to give charity, while the Left fails to show up at all.
So both the Left and the Right were responsible for Sebastian Bach? Interesting theory.
I am Laslo.
"he Right at least shows up once a month to give charity"
But ruin it by feeling good about doing it. Charity should only be given if doing so makes you feel miserable.
Otherwise you're not really sincere about helping the disadvantaged. And the disadvantaged hate that.
Ralph Hyatt said...
My church has partnered with several others to help support a homeless shelter. Is that wrong somehow?
Depends, I suppose. Do you teach them to fish, there?
True fact, whenever I volunteer with Habitat for Humanity I try to make myself as miserable as possible before going to the build site. I do that because I think the future resident can sense if a volunteer was happy to be helping someone when the house was built and would be offended.
"Depends, I suppose. Do you teach them to fish, there?"
Good point. If they are capable of being helped by it (that is they are homeless because they lost a job and couldn't pay their rent) then they are going to be pointed towards a program that could help them.
Others are offered counseling. But most homeless people, especially the chronically homeless, are mentally ill to some degree or another. Job training is not going to help them. And most Christians aren't libertarian in political outlook (though I do see a car in the church parking lot with a libertarian bumper sticker on occasion.) Sometimes food, shelter, and a warm coat is all you can do for someone.
So that's why when you are watching the local news and they have are reporting on a Habitat for Humanity build all the volunteers look so glum. Because they all know that love and charity only counts if the person offering it feels bad about themselves.
The poor are a very diverse group including mentally ill and addicts but also recently divorced women, recently unemployed men, families with a recent major illness or unemployment, recent immigrants, run away children, felons recently out of prison and hard core predatory criminals, long time unemployed men and drifters.
Some of these groups would benefit from dispersing shelters into the suburbs - all the hard luck people. But you can be certain that the liberals would insist on not "judging" and would send predatory criminals with no desire to change into the shelters in the better areas. And so NIMBY is reaction to liberalism as it is now just as the bad city schools are a product of liberalism - only in the case of schools they are quite determined not to disperse the kids to the suburbs. So strange. But then as they say "if liberals didn't have double standards they wouldn't have any standards at all."
What ideology has been running the big cities?
DBAAW - Don't Built Anything Anywhere.
'Round here it is BANANA, build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything.
I worked with urban planners during my past (employed) life. They always thought it natural and right to include homeless, low in come and attendant amenities in the ideal planned communities. They were always amazed when developers did not agree.
And I thought this post was about the meteoric rise and fall of Sebastian Bach?
When I was practicing law in Washington, DC, I did some pro bono work for outfits that were trying to establish facilities to help the homeless and very poor. We constantly had to battle NIMBYs. The vast majority of them were whites who had fairly recently moved into gentrifying downtown neighborhoods. The chance that any on them were far right wingers was vanishingly small. They were people who thought it was cool to live in an urban environment, but expected to be shielded from the realities of urban life.
Personally, I prefer suburban or exurban life, so I avoid their hypocrisy.
I am not a robot.
NIMBY is all left, all the time. Remember, the left doesn't give a damn about making life better for the poor. It only cares about using the poor to gain power. Keeping them poor is part of the key to keeping the power.
"By that, I mean the extreme right believes in NIMBYism — not in my back yard."
What a crock of sh*t! How many lefties / progressives live next to a halfway house or a drug treatment facility or a food kitchen? How many do so willingly? No body WANTS to live next to that due to the types of "elements" that frequent those places. There is generally more disorder and mayhem near those places and no one wants to raise a family with those additional stressers present.
Typical leftist clap-trap.
Living in suburban Los Angeles--although not all that suburban--I'll agree that Los Angeles's downtown Skid Row is a hellhole.
Heck, even the bums agree. If they can, they go hang out in Santa Monica; or in my part of town Glendale-Burbank. It's safer for them there. The two cities do have temporary shelters for the homeless in the winter (it does get "cold" here--I know you upper Midwesterners would say that "cold" in Southern California is a day at the beach in Madison--temperature wise anyway).
But getting neighbors to put up with permanent living quarters for those who would otherwise be homeless is difficult.
Social engineering with our mental health system in the 1960s--closing the mental hospitals with the best of intentions--has proved to be a disaster. Okay, schizophrenics and Senators both have the equal right to sleep under a bridge. That's wonderful--but the Senator is swanking around in San Francisco, and the schizophrenic is dying in the street.
NIMBY: Kennedy compound: wind farm.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-12-16/siemens-sees-kennedy-opposed-offshore-wind-farm-meeting-deadline
Walter Cronkite and the wind farm: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/20/cape.cod.wind.farm/
Fen's Law over and over again.
I read past the NIMBY remark even though I was offended by it. I was stopped by the citation that homelessness has declined by 20%. Since when, it what area and how did it? Perhaps by zero tolerance policing?
As George Bernard Shaw observed in Pygmalion in 1912, there is never any problem in dealing with the deserving poor- the problem is the undeserving poor. It is doing these folks no favor to allow them to live in the streets. I don't think anyone would choose to allow a loved one to live that way. Based on the numbers in the story, the city is spending between $27,000 and $42,000 a person on this place. Surely they could do better. Kudos to Mr. Joseph for trying to change what the city is doing by making people aware of the results of their actions.
How many lefties / progressives live next to a halfway house or a drug treatment facility or a food kitchen? How many do so willingly?
Brenda Konkel, a former alderperson and member of Progressive Dane, regularly allows homeless people to sleep in her house. She even installed lockers on her porch for them to use. Brenda also does a lot of work on the "tiny house" project, which Althouse attacked her for doing.
Those NIMBY fanatics - How could they not want ne'er-do-wells living in their backyards?
http://www.vdare.com/articles/social-engineers-move-inner-city-crime-to-suburbs-developers-delighted
I am a white guy, 60 years old, with a master's degree in engineering, an engineering job, and money in the bank. I am probably a little above the average on the economic scale.
I bought a house in 1998 in a mixed-race brand new neighborhood in a suburb of a large city. We loved getting to know our new neighbors. More than once I had black neighbors volunteer to help me, and I reciprocated. These were good people.
A section 8 apartment development opened about 4 blocks from my front door. The residents of the houses changed, too, over time to a lower point on the socio-economic spectrum.
After the change youths burned out an empty house, there were daily fights in the high school, and when my wife called me at work in the middle of the day to say there was a drive-by shooting at the rental house kitty-corner from ours we decided to spend some money and move away. My newer neighbors from a lower part of the socio-economic spectrum caused me to spend several thousand dollars on realtor and moving fees. It was worth it to me, but I feel that I am a victim of hooligans.
I have little sympathy for the part of society that has the culture of steal/fight/burn/complain as their basic world view. I am taking Martin Luther King's advice to judge people by the content of their character when making decisions on where I want to leave my wife and kids while I am away at work. NIMBY is my philosophy and I will move my back yard if need be.
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