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Homelessness: causes and solutions
Orca
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A GDST about homelessness.
From my uneducated perspective there are three causes:
1) Not enough money
2) Mental illness
3) Drug abuse
Let's discuss here instead of in the SCOTUS thread.
From my uneducated perspective there are three causes:
1) Not enough money
2) Mental illness
3) Drug abuse
Let's discuss here instead of in the SCOTUS thread.
Orca on
+2
Posts
2) A short run of bad luck that could also happen to you because we all suffer under capitalism.
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Rent keeps skyrocketing everywhere, and houses keep skyrocketing in value. I just got my second postcard this year saying the city has decided my house is worth $50,000 more than it used to be.
"That's great, you can sell it and make more money!" say my coworkers and family. Motherfucker I just want this roof over my head, this is not my investment portfolio or whatever the fuck, this is where I live. And now I have to pay more to keep living.
The first step has to be building more low income housing, or putting caps on rent and raising wages. We need new homeless shelters and more of them, and we need ways to help homeless people get back into society and get a job.
We also need to stop fucking with public places to make them less friendly to homeless people. Benches don't need a bar in the middle or a gap for a wheelchair user. We don't need to lock public bathrooms overnight.
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Can you, at a glance, tell if someone is high or extremely sleep deprived? High or processing some of the worst trauma of their lives? Or what is just behavior that is normal for that environment vs what is normal for yours in your day to day life? I couldn't, and I have worked extensively with both addiction and homelessness on separate occasions.
You are looking at a vastly different society from the outside and projecting your world onto it to draw conclusions. This is likely informed by the cultural narrative that is given to us through various media. It is also more likely for you to remember someone acting a fool than quietly trying to nap in the middle of the day. I can give you numerous examples of odd behaviors that make perfectly rational sense when that is how you survive while homeless. It isn't an easy or nice life.
The housing affordability crisis is a housing crisis, not an affordability crisis. The issue isn't a lack of money, it's a lack of housing. Because no amount of money will turn 10 homes into enough roofs for >10 households. Only building an >11th home will do that. You can make six figures and be in the top ~20% of wage earners and incapable of affording rent within a reasonable commute shed. Getting a pay raise won't really alter that, or, if it does, at best it just displaces someone else from Lake Woebegone
It is absolutely affordability and not availability. There are more homes than homeless. Yes even in desirable areas. Link for San Francisco https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/61000-homes-are-empty-in-san-francisco-report/
Housing is a complicated problem that has to be attacked in multiple sides.
"Vacation homes" means the issue is still availability.
you'll never guess
drum roll please
...
it's housing prices.
Not at all. Those only happen because we have such a wealth disparity that it can, and no regulations against it. We have the houses. Someone having a second house is not a fraction as important as a first one.
When I saw this thread, I did quick google - prepared to come in here and act all high and mighty as a European about how this is much less of a problem over here (Germany).
The numbers tell a different story.
In 2022, Germany had 50.000 people living on the street.
Overall, it counted somewhere around 600.000 people without housing. Meaning they live in shelters, with friends and the like.
Google (and the beginning of that Connover video) tell me, the US currently has around the same absolute number of homeless people. 600.000-ish.
Given that the US is 4 times the population size of Germany (330 vs. 82 million), this says it is a bigger problem in Germany, if we have the same people without homes. Sure, we count refugees among the homeless as well, but still.
That kinda threw me.
Sorry, if this doesn't read as a coherent thought, it just really surprised me.
Okay.
But those vacation homes are not available.
So tax non-primary residencies at such an obscene rate they become available.
Totally. Or make vacation homes illegal and confiscate them. In the meantime, though.
There are generally different terms, people without shelter are unsheltered homeless/ sleeping rough, but the HUD Point in Time census counts both sheltered and unsheltered as homeless due to shelters not qualifying as a fixed, regular residence.
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahar/2023-ahar-part-1-pit-estimates-of-homelessness-in-the-us.html
They go into definitions in the 'about this report'
In the meantime pass those laws. Because the housing is available. No one is living in it.
Or make home ownership illegal and require people to share their living spaces as designated by government census.
But until that happens, it's availability.
Something like 10-13% (depending on your source) of homes in the US are vacant. Vacation homes account for around 4-7% of homes. That's still a staggering number of homes that are well and truly vacant.
Incorrect. It is affordablility. Build more homes and more wealthy people will flock to desirable areas that leave the poorest still vulnerable. 61,000 houses are currently available to house people. Building more doesn't solve the problem.
Edit: Somebody else owns these and doesn't want you to live there is a problem no matter how many houses you have.
We can still blame privatization and capitalism for this - the lack of facilities to provide care and rehabilitation to people in need is a root issue when it comes to getting these folks off the streets and into shelter.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Those homes did not get flipped or re-sold and nobody's moved into them. They're not even for sale, they're just being held like trading cards.
Anecdotal, I know, but this sort of shit needs to be flatly fucking illegal and these firms should have to say bye bye to all their assets. Turn all of their assets into low-income housing. All of them.
I would argue that flies in the face of all the data we have and isn't based on anything concrete. Making decisions based on vibes doesn't help anyone.
Is housing cheap where you live?
The last I remember seeing actual analysis of this once you start accounting for things that are temporarily vacant in between being sold and being bought (or rented), stuff that is being renovated, and so on for all the different reasons things are vacant, it actual leaves a very negligible number of homes that are actually "vacant" in a meaningful sense of this is just sitting there empty because no one wants to pay the asking price for it or it.
Don't remember exactly which city it was, but I recall one actually implementing a vacancy tax and it accomplished basically nothing in terms of increasing housing or reducing prices.
Going after things like RealPage is a good idea too. That's kind of secondary to building more housing since the reason scams like RealPage work is due to housing limitations, but monopolistic pricing is bad and the DOJ should burn that entire business entity to the ground and salt the earth it was built on.
Obviously no!
But where I live I avoid a stretch of 6th Ave where the guy who paints with his feces hangs out in front of the antique shop, the woman who screams at everyone going by that they have taken her bags and occasionally gets into fights with them…
Unhoused is a pretty big bucket, and I know there are a bunch of folks who sneak sleeping in their office or car and take showers at the planet fitness right there alongside the folks on the street mentioned earlier, and they are all part of that one number, so I will acquiesce that not everyone falls into the profile I am giving.
But the on the street, set up camp folks in NYC are almost to a person not doing well mentally. And the police are simply not equipped to deal with this (not that I want them to be the tool used).
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Building more homes on its own does not solve the problem. The housing built is not meant to alleviate the problem and so never does.
I mean this is perception bias, even as described here.
Savannah used to have a compassionate system where the homeless had a tent city under a bridge. It was better than nothing, and the city provided job Johnny’s potable water and charities and social groups had a place to go to, to help.
Is it a perfect solution? Absolutely not, but it was better than what happened after, which happened because rich fuckers built a bunch of million dollar houses and they could see the homeless camp so the police cleared it out and didn’t have a place for them, and it’s not like the homeless have a place to go.
So now they are spread out. With homeless camps popping up all over and the mayor trying real hard to spin it as being his success and not “we cleared a homeless camp and they moved to another area.”
One of the primary ways to get to be left alone when you have no safe place to go is seem goose level aggressive. There is a reason so many people are frightened of them despite their lack of ability to really hurt people usually. You will also have people cover themselves in shit and piss because smelling bad will ward of other as well. You are trying to judge people based on survival strategies you don't understand.
Take the woman who screams at people for taking her bag. If that works even once a month that his a huge windfall for her. So yeah she tries it. Mostly it doesn't work. Mostly it makes her look unhinged and not someone to fuck with. Maybe it is because she is unwell. Maybe it is because it is a deliberate strategy. Either way if it is only 2 people it is not representative of anything.
Two things can be true here. There needs to be policy overhauls and resources to help the unhoused, but there will be no magic bullet that will help everyone. I think it is important to implement resources anyway, and fix the bigger issue of people living on the streets because housing is out of their means, and then maybe work on the issue of mental health/drug use separately (even later), but unfortunately most people conflate the two because there was that one time they were accosted by a dude randomly on the street. Both problems need solutions!
* The caveat here is that the majority of the unhoused DO report severe anxiety or depression! But neither leads to hostile interactions with other people on the street.
People blame having mental illness for people ending up homeless, but the truth is a society where one can become homeless can easily break someone who otherwise would be fine. And drug abuse? Well, again if you've hit rock bottom how could any empathetic person judge someone for taking some form of a escape from the hellhole that is being failed by our capitalist oligarchy?
People become homeless because capitalism is bad.
Everything else so far, I'm in agreement with re: causes, conditions etc