alt Hacker NewsThat's everywhere, there are homeless people everywhere. The difference is Silicon Valley feels so guilty about it's wealth it refuses to do the normal things that societies do to prevent people from living like animals because 'rights' or something, so they let drug addicts live in their common spaces without treatment. This normally isn't tolerated in a functioning society where people are pressured into behaviors that are less self destructive.
When someone isn't competent to make decisions for themselves it's ok to pressure them into engaging in behavior that will lead them to get to a condition where they can start to make decisions for themselves. In Silicon Valley they have let their guilt be leveraged by a corrupt government system that lets grifters steal billions of dollars per year in 'homelessness funding'. Those same grifters fund political groups and bribe politicians. Anyone that questions it is accused of wanting to murder homeless people.
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That's not how it works at all. You can't pressure people into becoming a productive member of society.
What you can do when it already happened is kill them or make them die in some ways, jail them or try to support and/or treat them.
I hope it goes without saying that letting them just die or killing or jailing them is not an option in a western society.
Prevention is much more favorable of course. For example, don't let people become homeless easily. But even then, a significant amount will become homeless.
Homeless people are a better way to keep cowardly minions (I mean, valuable employees) in line than cops. The homeless are an important part of capitalist power structures. They are a visible reminder of the consequences for not meeting quarterly goals.
No, homeless people are not everywhere.
Homelessness is created by high rents. High rents are created by high local productivity. The people who are productive enough to make it over the rent-bar are housed, and their marginal productivity above the rent-bar serves to raise the rent-bar (talk to any landlord about how they set rent prices: it's the local wages, stupid). This then pushes a greater proportion of people below the rent-bar, and then they are homeless.
There are few places in the world more productive per square foot than Silicon Valley, ergo one must be extremely productive in order to remain housed there, ergo it has an extremely bad homelessness problem.
That's why people making $200k+ (an extremely productive person by national standards) need public housing assistance in Silicon Valley (https://www.reuters.com/article/world/palo-alto-considers-su...). Which of course actually just... raises the rent again...
The charities may be full of grift and whatnot, but you can remove them entirely and you will not solve the fundamental problem.
No, it's actually very unusual to have tons of homeless people next to spectacular wealth, California is a global outlier in this phenomenon.
There are many, many places in the world that are much poorer and don't have homeless encampments all over the place.