“Homelessness is a Housing Problem”: More housing lowers homelessness
seliger.com
seliger.com
If someone living in a home currently falls into drug addiction, there’s a good chance they go into financial ruin and lose their home.
That said there’s definitely a lack of supply with housing especially in places like SF.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta...
Unfortunately, if governments fixed the problem by increasing supply then that means lower rents so landlords would have less money to buy coke with. So that's a non starter.
It's probably better all round if we throw a bit of cash at methadone clinics for all the homeless people who tried to salve the crushing pain of being priced out on to the street by taking drugs.
Yeah, it's complicated. It's a good thing that we have reliable, objective media to educate us about the real story.
If, on the other hand, you give homes to people who need them, unconditionally (and provide support for addiction and mental health problems), you get people off the streets and they can and do rebuild their lives [1].
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...
To be fair, the history of humanity is overwhelmingly marred by barbarism. When it comes to establishing and maintaining governance, humanity appears to have a penchant for isolating and punishing groups that fall outside of the in-crowd.
For instance, look at heavily policed neighborhoods populated mostly by low income families. Are those neighborhoods really so different from the megastructure block housing units in the movie Dredd? The only thing that really changed from here to there is the population density.
How much would home prices have to fall to make it 'affordable' and a viable option compared to homelessness? Are there really people living on the street because they can't find an apartment for $1200? But they aren't willing to move 90 miles to Merced for an $800 studio?
Another answer would be to just move the damn jobs somewhere else.
The communists were (and always have been) pretty keen on building enough apartment blocks to house everybody.
PAP is not communist but is famously unafraid of ripping off opposition party policies at the same time as crushing them by more conventional means.
They did the same thing again in the 90s with a popular party set up to protest large class sizes in schools. They took the policy, watered it down a bit and then bullied the party into nonexistence.
Singapore kind of semi works as an authoritarian country in a way no others could because of the uncomfortable proximity of its people to its rulers brings accountability that wouldnt exist elsewhere: https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/13/naypyidaw-on-hudson-iso... but it's still largely run by thugs.