One of the most fundamental understandings of civil planning is that any given area can only support so many people. You can add civil services like water, sewer, roads, and many others, but in the end, you always reach a point where you simply run out of the ability to support the sheer volume of people that are in a given area.
This reality is easily understandable when one looks at cities like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and even some of the smaller giant cities like Seattle, Chicago, and Washington DC. Just because you were born there, does not mean that the area has the ability to support you. We used to understand that as a collective, it was called common sense, but today, our wishful thinking has replaced reality based thinking, and so we believe we have a "right" to live where we want.
Well, you do, what you do not have, however, is a right to live there with any expectations of any specific standard of living.
You might be one who wants the beach life of Los Angeles, or the nightlight of New York City. Perhaps it is the moral abyss of the San Francisco anarchy that draws you. Whatever it is, you feel like because that is where you are from, or where you want to be, that you have some kind of fundamental "right" to live there as an equal to everyone else. That is where you are, simply put, wrong.
Throughout human history people have left cities because of scarce jobs, lack of housing, cramped housing, lack of services, and so much more. Yet today, we think such realities are beneath us. WE should not have to move, after all, "I was born here/want to live here."
But reality is reality, and jobs do not appear just because people are born. City services cannot create more water or adequate sewage runoff just because people do not want to move. Resources are finite things, and when you run out, it is time to let people push on to greener pastures.
Yet, because poor people are a captive voter bloc, who are easily manipulated, and who will vote for those who are giving them handouts, politicians would rather keep them in the cities rather than allowing them / pushing them to go and find better lives elsewhere. After all, if the entirety of the voting bloc is constituted of satisfied citizenry, who are generally happy with their lot, how can you use class warfare to turn them against each other and vault you into power?
How callused do you have to be to allow someone to live in squalor simply because you are too hard hearted to tell them that moving somewhere else is the best thing they could do?
How clueless do you have to be to believe that the "loving" thing to do is to be soft and give what you do not have rather than give then the necessary tough love and make the life of the person better?
No, we cannot simply create reality in the form that we want it. Unless some new technology fundamentally alters some part of the reality, the best thing we can do is help people to do/live the best that they possibly can, and most of the time, that is outside of the city, even if it is the city that they want.
Life is not about getting what you want, nor is it often about getting what you deserve, rather it is a series of adjustments to the reality that life has given us.
After all, that is just common sense.
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