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Comment by EdwardDiego | Hacker News Reader

> the housing crisis in these big cities is almost entirely an addiction problem

So, there's a lack of affordable housing because... ...people take drugs?|

Can you expand on that? I feel like I've missed something in your post that explains the logical leap there.

No. There is a lack of affordable housing because the economy doesn’t have a way to cope with widening gaps of productivity (not to mention systemic and historical racism).

However, the vast majority (writing from a phone on train so I’ll have to challenge you to prove me wrong rather than cite, but the statistics are clear on this) of homeless people are deep in the throes of addiction or, mentally unstable.

The working family that can’t make ends meet absolutely exists, I am not in anyway challenging that.

But, go to one of these tent cities yourself , where these exploding homeless populations exist, and it will be apparent that people are so addicted that there is not rent that would be “affordable” as their basic human needs aren’t even being met for them to be functioning in a positive economic way.

Essentially these people are sick, in a genuinely diagnosable way, and that sickness manifests in self harm. IMO, it’s pretty clear that this mass sickness (primarily the opiate crisis) is the leading cause of these exploding homeless populations.

So your argument is that people become homeless because either they take too much medicine or too little medicine?

If you define taking pain pills to get high as “taking too much medicine” and then making bad decisions while withdrawing is “too little medicine”, then yes that is a very significant minority of people ending up homeless.

But it doesn’t account for people addicted to meth, or alcohol, or people suffering from schizophrenia, etc.

By too little medicine I mean to imply people with untreated or mistreated mental illness.

So, taking what I stated (with the clarification of “too little”) as your argument, what exactly are you proposing as avenues towards home-havingness?

I have not gone so far to make a proposal, which would depend on the hypothetical resources available to execute a plan.

I am just providing context for how to think about the problem in a way that (much) more closely maps to reality than low-earners getting displaced due to gentrification and wage stagnation.

I take issue with the fact that your map of reality is precisely what causes people to slip through the cracks into homelessness. Thinking about the issue as a sickness is actually just an avoidance of the problem. You are trying to reduce and abstract it away to the domain of medicine rather than to address it head on as a complex system of systems.

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