In the US, we have many more vacant houses than we have homeless people. The market system is incapable of solving this very simple problem.
Do you have any data on this? This doesn't really pass the smell test for me, even though it potentially sounds like a satisfying explanation of part of the problem.
Right now, homeless people are not customers, meaning they are not making money off of those people, when they could be if those people were actually renters.
Not necessarily physically visible. Just mentally visible.
Do you really believe business owners, and landlords are sitting in some smokey room plotting to keep people homeless so people will pay their rent?
Really, that is your honest held belief of the situation?
That is a ridiculous and moronic position. People can have good faith disagreements on how to solve social problems, and if you believe government is not the right avenue for that solution it does not mean you want or desire people to be homeless.
Indeed, there are always people who are looking to cut public services, but the discussion was about the motive for doing that.
Ironically (or not), the title of this overall thread is "This is Real, That's Not". The content of the discussions is a fine reflection of the very phenomenon that Doreen is talking about, and I suspect a plausible demonstration of why humanity can't sort its shit out, decade after decade: an inability (or unwillingness) to acknowledge the self-delusional nature of the human mind.
> What is the motive there?
The motives are complex, and unknown (the necessary callable public interfaces to obtain such knowledge do not exist - and yet, observe the number of people in this thread who perceive that they have knowledge of the contents of other people's minds. Is this not an extremely interesting phenomenon? Might this phenomenon have consequences in a complex system, especially if it exists but is completely unrealized?
I suspect that a specific, conscious motivation to bring about the specific end state that we are experiencing (inequality, homelessness, human suffering in general) also does not actually exist. Rather, I reckon the mess we are living in is more like some sort of a cosmic demonstration of the law unintended consequences, due to an unwillingness to acknowledge the complexities inherent in reality. A religious person may consider this punishment from God for disobedience. A comedian (or a schizophrenic) may consider it to be comedy at its finest. Each individual perceives reality through a custom lens, and comes to vastly different conclusions.
I could be wrong of course, but it's a fun way to look at it. Part of the fun is observing how people react to crazy ideas like this, that may actually have a fair amount of validity to them (how might we know, for sure, if they do, or do not?).
I don't doubt that there are some people who want this, but the idea that there's a giant, organized, shadowy group out there... that's something out of a very bad spy movie.
The full spectrum of causation is often (strongly) asserted to be very specific things, but rarely does one encounter any person or organization asserting that the problem is complex and not fully understood. It does not seem unreasonable at all to me that some wrongdoing may indeed be happening here and there.
That said, the highly inconsistent (other than confidence levels of assertions) approach to conspiracy theories is indeed wonderfully ironic.
Today is a good example of this...one one hand we have a thread about the abstract notion of CIA deception:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25329913
When discussing this sort of topic abstractly, it seems the HN hivememind has no problem whatsoever conceptualizing it.
However, if one changes the topic to a specific, object level news event (Jimmy Wales & Wikipedia), the ability (to conceptualize deceit) seems to vanish, as ~always:
Landlords don’t “prefer” homelessness to exist. Their position, as capitalists, ends with their interests.
Many (not all!) landlord are quite simple: “Pay rent or I will evict you and find someone else”. That’s it.
After an eviction, they don’t care whether the person moves elsewhere or is homeless. In fact I’d argue that most people are probably on the gooder side of good and would prefer their former tenant move elsewhere and live a nice comfortable life and someone else can deal with their poorness.
What they do absolutely want is the ability to enforce that eviction. That’s key. But I doubt they care so much about the looming threat of homelessness.
Landlords "prefer" homelessness exist because that the surplus demand over the supply that they provide.
Yes, rents going down is not what a landlord wants. Just like salary going down (all things being equal). But it's not as if all landlords are conspiring to keep people homeless to increase their rents.
Yes they would accuse/blame the homelessness solver of decreasing their rents and they would be correct. I'm not a landlord and I would 'blame' or point out the same thing. That doesn't mean that I think it's wrong while at the same time correctly identifying it as the cause...