OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
That's very similar to what we have here. Our downtown is now a ghost town compared to what it was. We have 5 methadone clinics and a place that's handing out needles. This is all clustered right around the downtown.
The opioid epidemic - hoppers/thieves
- Thread starter OVERKILL
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If it were me, I would move. Putting up with being around that with no resolution in the future is something I would not tolerate, especially with the housing market the way it is. Without talking politics, moving is the only solution I see fit here.
Call 1911. Preferably .40
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
You are able to use appropriate force to deal with a threat, so definitely not like Texas. And you will absolutely be charged if you do use the appropriate amount of force, but those charges will be dropped later.I'm guessing OVERKILL there's no castle doctrine there where you live. Those guys better count their lucky stars they don't live in Texas
We've had several cases of that. A man in Apsley had an armed intruder break into his house and he shot him dead. Guy was charged, but the charges were eventually dropped. There was a more recent case of this as well.
So, if I had a guy break-in and he's unarmed, it would be extremely difficult to justify discharging my 12-gauge. However, they are typically armed, usually with knives or box cutters. The ones with firearms are usually higher up the chain and not doing B&E's and those guns are of course not of legal origin. However, a perp armed with a knife, if you feel the lives of yourself and your family are in danger, is an appropriate threat to meet with a firearm, that's considered reasonable.
One thing I had a LEO tell me was that if you do use lethal force, make sure the perp is dead, as things go a lot smoother when your side of the story is the only one to tell.
Sounds no different than here. At one time Austin was rated as the top place to live in the USA by some magazine - 3 years in a row! That was surely the kiss of death. The growth is crushing for traffic reasons and lack of useful public transport alone, but then for a time the homeless camping ban was repealed. We must have gained 200% homeless population in a few months. The ban was later reinstated when they put it in front of the voters, but the problem persists. I used to live right in town, Austin proper, but I've since moved to the suburbs.
At least since I changed to a different department with my employer that is located in a different part of the city, I no longer have to deal with it as much. In my old location there was a HUGE homeless encampment right down the street. They live under a bridge at night and come up in the day to beg for money, turn tricks, sell drugs, etc. At one time the city cleaned up the whole deal under the bridge after a fire broke out under there, it took them days and multiple semi dump trailers to get it all out of there. Now, my new office is an upscale neighborhood where houses go in the $1M and there are no homeless in sight. I feel safe walking places again around my office.
I saw a news article the other day that Austin is on track to become the least affordable market outside of California. I don't know why people move here anymore, and I wish they would stop. I mean if you want to live in town, it's going to cost you $1M plus to live in a decent neighborhood with decent schools, or you're going to be sitting in traffic for an hour to get to work (well, once things cycle back to normal anyway). Nevertheless, Oracle has moved it's HQ here, Apple is building a gigantic expansion to it's campus, and there is the new Tesla factory under construction. The city has tripled in size since I moved here 29 years ago and it is not a better place to live for it. Long term, I'm looking for the exit. Austin was a medium sized city when I moved here. It's now a large city by any reasonable metric.
At least since I changed to a different department with my employer that is located in a different part of the city, I no longer have to deal with it as much. In my old location there was a HUGE homeless encampment right down the street. They live under a bridge at night and come up in the day to beg for money, turn tricks, sell drugs, etc. At one time the city cleaned up the whole deal under the bridge after a fire broke out under there, it took them days and multiple semi dump trailers to get it all out of there. Now, my new office is an upscale neighborhood where houses go in the $1M and there are no homeless in sight. I feel safe walking places again around my office.
I saw a news article the other day that Austin is on track to become the least affordable market outside of California. I don't know why people move here anymore, and I wish they would stop. I mean if you want to live in town, it's going to cost you $1M plus to live in a decent neighborhood with decent schools, or you're going to be sitting in traffic for an hour to get to work (well, once things cycle back to normal anyway). Nevertheless, Oracle has moved it's HQ here, Apple is building a gigantic expansion to it's campus, and there is the new Tesla factory under construction. The city has tripled in size since I moved here 29 years ago and it is not a better place to live for it. Long term, I'm looking for the exit. Austin was a medium sized city when I moved here. It's now a large city by any reasonable metric.
I took advantage of this cycle in close in East Austin back in the early 00s when I was single and childless. Tripled my value in 12 years, and it has continued to rise since I left.
It makes no sense to me that people would pay stupid money for 60s houses with small bathrooms and closets on unstable soil with areas with horrible schools, but it is what it is. Pretty much every house in my old neighborhood has had or will need foundation repair to their slab foundations due to the unstable soil anywhere east of the Balcones Escarpment. This is more or less the transition from the Texas Hill Country limestone substrate rocky soil to the deep coastal soil. You have to drill down to bedrock to make it stable, and effectively transform it to pier and beam. Cost me $15K as part of a larger remodeling project.
I suppose on the flip side, it's much easier to keep a green St Augustine lawn on the east side. I'm in the rocky soil now and you can't grow St Augustine here, everyone has more drought tolerant grass types which are more fussy because they don't drown out the weeds. St. Augustine is easy because it will choke everything else out so long as you water enough. You don't even really need weed and feed with St Augustine, just give it fertilizer and water and you will have zero weeds in your grass. But it needs consistent soil moisture, which is hard to do without watering every day anywhere west of I-35.
I worked in hospital pharmacy for decades. Fentanyl was and is a superb drug when used in a hospital or medically supervised condition. The same goes for Propofol which became extremely popular.
Unfortunately the illicit drug industry has taken advantage of these and other drugs.
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Austin is definitely one of the most beautiful cities in Texas. The politics of Austin are what ruins the city. I loved going there in the late 1980s. A friend of mine calls it the San Francisco of Texas.
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There is no possible way to prevent all these drugs coming from different countries,
cartels in mexico use TUNNELS to smuggle things in by the border and have been for a very long time though its hard to detect.
legalizing these drugs for "recreational use" is far more worse though, even kids would start consuming it like candy if it reaches social acceptance.
The war on drugs made it even worse, though.
cartels in mexico use TUNNELS to smuggle things in by the border and have been for a very long time though its hard to detect.
legalizing these drugs for "recreational use" is far more worse though, even kids would start consuming it like candy if it reaches social acceptance.
The war on drugs made it even worse, though.
That's nothing.
In San Francisco people use jacks to prop up old Victorian era houses and then put a new slab foundation, gut all electrical and plumbing, remove all sheetrocks and basically keep just the roof and frame. Why? They are using loophole to get around public hearing to build a new house (nimby neighbor always try to drag you through delays so you will never get to finish building it). Yes it cost more and it is listed as an OLD house but we all know it is really a new house with an old frame. It cost more in construction cost but the location is worth the money and the savings in regulation is well worth it.
In general people will pay for a rebuild / repair / remodel if the location is good, school is good, close to good jobs, nice weather, etc. Building a nice house in the middle of nowhere and it will still turn into a slum in 20 years as it ages over time. Older neighborhood tends to be on larger lot, nicer location near something valuable (downtown financial district, good school, park, river, etc), so people will treasure the old house on top of the lot.
1) Demand and supply dictates prices, one of the argument to decriminalize drug is to flood the supply so it is not worth the money it once was. This is how prohibition failed and why alcohol is no longer illegal outside of extremely religious nations with oil money. Even they have loophole for those who try to evade it.
2) Desperate people will do desperate things for money, desperate organization will use desperate way to fund wars and intelligence gathering. Many wars are funded by drug trade, many revolutions, many dictators, many intelligence organization not getting their own govs funding will do side businesses to be self sufficient. I'll refrain from calling why these orgs are to not get this locked.
3) If you ban one thing the dealers will find other things to make money on. The problem with drug is, follow the money and power and you will know why someone is willing or not willing to do something. Most dictatorship just won out of a drug funded civil war tend to ban all drugs and kill all the dealers, force addicts to come clean or face executions. Many of them started with drug funding and they want that funding cut after they are no longer needed. Unfortunately in the US our system has a lot of money to be made one way or another, and many fundings are local paid so the will to clean the whole system up together is nil. It is a game of who pays for it vs who lives where.
Yes this is how Oakland and Alameda here turn from industrial hub during WW2 to slum after the industry left. SF had the same problem in SoMa until the tech boom. One of our top political party leader's husband are in the redevelopment as well as the VC funded startup scene, so somehow all of a sudden those aging industrial building turns into LiveWork or other hip tech startup offices, and basically gentrify the local low income drug den. It is still rough but gone were the days when a girl almost got kidnapped off the street into the back of a van until her dad came out shooting in the air to scare him off (yes that happened to the girlfriend of one of the person I know).
Real estate pricing wise, it is a relative price instead of absolute price. Or should I say it is just inflation and RE is the only real indicator of real pricing of money. Everyone in the world is paying more for housing now than before. Those old math of "28% for housing" is no longer useful. People will either have to pick commute, size, quality (school, crime, condition, etc), or a place that they cannot find higher paying jobs (eventually remote work will pay a lot less, balancing out the cost of living benefits).
The more "tough on law" and "see I told you your policies won't work" states and towns have been sending their addicts to San Francisco and then calling San Francisco names. However it is getting expensive to be a homeless there too, so now many chooses Hawaii instead and got shipped there instead of San Francisco.
The welcoming committees at intersections has really increased in our area in the last several years. Being pretty much a daily runner, I run past their spots and have a closer and more personal view of the mess they make than folks driving by in cars.
At one intersection, Conference Dr/I-386, they’ve set up a makeshift camp in some trees and bushes next to the interstate overpass. The whole area is littered with everything you’d expect to be there, and it stinks to high Heaven, because, of course, they urinate and defecate over there, and just throw their refuse on the ground.
Of course, there are signs that say “STATE PROPERTY - NO TRESPASSING”.
Ive seen them attempting to use their cell phones surreptitiously, and they carpool together in a minivan.
I can only assume that they do pretty well out there, because theyre out there every day until dusk. I’d be curious to know where they go after they get into that van.
I don’t understand why people give them cash.
Remember the Chechen Islamic terrorists who took over a theater in Russia and took everyone inside hostage?
I recall that the Russian govt decided to pump fentanyl gas in through the HVAC system to knock everyone out cold, including the terrorists.
Problem was, they couldn’t precisely control the dosage, for obvious reasons, and several people, including some hostages, were killed.
Don't you love it when they try and stop you and ask for some spare change while you're running? During the pandemic they became more aggressive as they couldn't just stand there, they'd come after you if they saw you on the streets because there were so few people on the street that they had to ask everyone they saw.
JHZR2
Staff member
This is my concern. I see more and more these idiots who think they’re cultured because they listened to reggae music and some rap when they were teens, and think that drug culture of some sort (not inner city or gang type stuff) and being free to take the stuff makes them even more cosmopolitan and woke and whatever else. It’s just lunacy.
I hate marijuana. I don’t care personally if someone wants to smoke it. But I see a very low class culture emanating from it, and it worries me what would come from broader legalization of drugs.
As for the breaking and entering, I can leave stuff unlocked for weeks, no issues, but when it’s your night, it’s your night. No breaking, but lots of entering unlocked vehicles, and unlocked bikes do get stolen. Around here there is the thought of it being more and more junkies, but we just don’t see them on the streets, and it’s still typically the young black kids from the poorer towns who walk/transit/get a ride and hit neighborhoods. My wife caught them in a neighbor’s car a few years back, and I caught one on a kid’s bike that had just been noted in the town social site as stolen. But it’s the same age demographic, from the same towns, as it has been for the last 50+ years. They can be helped by having more family direction and positive influences. So I’m hoping for the best there.
In other places I do see the signs of drugs. Took the kids to a park That we had never been to. It was further from the nice suburbs. Ended picking up six or seven syringes off the ground. Had to call the police because I didnt know what to do with them. Another place I go to sometimes, further from any major city, ive heard more and more about heroin being an issue. Im sure it is closer to me too, one just doesn’t see it as much because I think people are more willing to call the cops when the see anomalies, and parents are more involved in their kids lives. We will see how things change as more anti-police stuff happens…
Use of addictive drugs undermines society by undermining quality of life for the addict and for everyone around him/her.
Alcohol for alcoholics, meaning people who have become chemically dependent on alcohol, and cigarettes, which are doctored to be addictive, are comparable. People who grew up with alcoholic parents have told me about items in the house disappearing because the parent sold or pawned them to buy the next bottle of booze.
I've heard similar stories about heavy smokers, such as a mom pawning her kid's video game system to buy smokes. Many smokers will steal packs or cartons of cigarettes, which is why every store has them under lock and key today. That wasn't always true.
These are watered-down versions of the illicit-drug problem, but they're just as real.
Those who manufacture, grow, or sell addictive illicit drugs aren't friends of society. But neither are the users, and they deserve no sympathy. The strongman who runs the Philippines cracked down by executing sellers and even users there because insurgents trying to take over are running the drug trade there, so that's an extreme case.
We have flip-flopped over the years, and here the attitude is that users are somehow victims. To be blunt, when we had a much harder line against drug use in the past, we also had far fewer problems from it. Few people used heroin in the 1950s, and those few were considered the lowest of the low then.
What has destroyed any chance for now of taking a harder line was the irrational overresponse and over-enforcement of laws against cannabis. This was the low-hanging fruit for law enforcement and the feds in the 1970s–1990s. More $$$ was spent on weed busts than on going after harder stuff. Throwing people in prison for smoking weed made little sense to most people because the response was out of proportion to the harm caused.
And the backlash against the cannabis laws, combined with victim culture, has put us where we are now with the harder drugs.
It's interesting that the supposed source of illicit fentanyl, China, has very strict laws against illicit drug use there. But I wonder whether China is really playing the role some people are claiming. There are plenty of other bad actors.
Alcohol for alcoholics, meaning people who have become chemically dependent on alcohol, and cigarettes, which are doctored to be addictive, are comparable. People who grew up with alcoholic parents have told me about items in the house disappearing because the parent sold or pawned them to buy the next bottle of booze.
I've heard similar stories about heavy smokers, such as a mom pawning her kid's video game system to buy smokes. Many smokers will steal packs or cartons of cigarettes, which is why every store has them under lock and key today. That wasn't always true.
These are watered-down versions of the illicit-drug problem, but they're just as real.
Those who manufacture, grow, or sell addictive illicit drugs aren't friends of society. But neither are the users, and they deserve no sympathy. The strongman who runs the Philippines cracked down by executing sellers and even users there because insurgents trying to take over are running the drug trade there, so that's an extreme case.
We have flip-flopped over the years, and here the attitude is that users are somehow victims. To be blunt, when we had a much harder line against drug use in the past, we also had far fewer problems from it. Few people used heroin in the 1950s, and those few were considered the lowest of the low then.
What has destroyed any chance for now of taking a harder line was the irrational overresponse and over-enforcement of laws against cannabis. This was the low-hanging fruit for law enforcement and the feds in the 1970s–1990s. More $$$ was spent on weed busts than on going after harder stuff. Throwing people in prison for smoking weed made little sense to most people because the response was out of proportion to the harm caused.
And the backlash against the cannabis laws, combined with victim culture, has put us where we are now with the harder drugs.
It's interesting that the supposed source of illicit fentanyl, China, has very strict laws against illicit drug use there. But I wonder whether China is really playing the role some people are claiming. There are plenty of other bad actors.
Austin area has a history with Tech but more importantly Texas has no capital gains tax. That's enticing for silicon valley executives (ex, Elon Musk) who have millions in stock options which they want to exercise or have made a bundle in crypto. So basically what you have is hundreds of thousands of dollars in California equity driving up prices.
I've happened upon recent Youtube videos of Kensington Ave., Philadelphia. They are mind numbing. Zombie apocalypse .
Very serious problem with very complex solutions. Does anyone here have any real solution ideas?
Very serious problem with very complex solutions. Does anyone here have any real solution ideas?
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