I’ve never been good at delivering bad news, my apologies.

Talk to your neighbor and explore a run for office if it interests you. Actually wanting to be engaged is the first step, and it sounds like you want to. No one is coming to save us, it’s just us.

I’m leaving for Western Europe, all of the tools I need for advocacy and accountability work just fine from over there (laptop and mobile device are all that is required). I’m unable to run for office, I am not an ideal candidate for various reasons. I want the country improved long term, but am unwilling to suffer in the short term because of, for lack of a better words, the malevolent and troglodytes. In the case of voting, you can’t persuade some people even with evidence and data. You might just have to wait for old people to age out (1.8 million voters over the age of 55 age out every year) and younger folks (open to new ideas and mental models) to come of age, before there are improved chances of success. If you have to wait somewhere, don’t wait here if you don’t have to (life lesson: never suffer needlessly).

(I also contribute time to helping anyone wanting to expat out of the US get to higher quality jurisdictions, Europe, Australia, etc)

> So to be clear, you are saying my tax money should be used to house the homeless, at exorbitant rates

Yes.

> While I cannot afford to buy a house myself

Affordable housing should be a right to everyone. Anyone, including you, should have the option to live in affordable housing that is nice, ideally with amenities and gardens and common areas if they cannot afford to pay for that on their own. Public housing, like it is in some other countries, should be not a stigmatized fallback but the normalized default. And that’s what the property taxes on the home I currently own should be paying for, so if — for whatever reason — I can no longer afford it or no longer want it, I can move into a dignified public housing accommodation too.

> Not sure if you have lived near homeless encampments before

I have. And my conclusion doesn’t change— they should have housing. Nice housing and the help they need to get back on their feet. We all should.

Treating the "homelessness" as a single problem is naive. I live near homeless encampments and near people who have been quietly living out of their vehicles for 5+ years. Some percentage of the homeless population can be fixed with cheaper housing. Some percentage of people can avoid being homeless altogether with cheaper housing. And some percentage will be homeless regardless of how cheap the housing is (i guess unless it's free and they agree to not break whatever rules/laws apply to them).

Meanwhile both sides just shout at each other and funnel millions of dollars into groups that don't make any real progress and have no accountability. It's the same useless polarization that exists in politics except I'm not even sure it's a political issue at this point given how 1-party the place i live in is.

> So to be clear, you are saying my tax money should be used to house the homeless, at exorbitant rates, while I cannot afford to buy house myself.

Who says it has to be your tax money? There are plenty of millionaires and billionaires in this country, and yet for some reason the only solutions that ever get traction are to put the tax burden on literally everyone other than the people with the most wealth. Hmm, gee, I wonder why? Probably nothing to do with the political duopoly said millionaires and billionaires bankroll, right?

> I don't think homelessness can be solved by building more housing.

It definitionally can and is solved by building housing for the people who lack housing.

> Not sure if you have lived near homeless encampments before. If you know you know.

I'm happy to put it all out there so people can judge where I'm coming from.

I'm not an expert on homelessness, either in a scientific sense or a first-hand one. I have a few long-term friendships with people who have at various points been homeless for a year or more (some traveling, some local to an area). For a couple years, I worked near a few hotspots for where homeless people would gather during the day and/or sleep at night in the downtown of a relatively small city. In college, I often had neighborly chats with the local homeless people who regularly went through the dumpsters in my apartment complex's parking lot. We'd chat whenever we met while I walked out there to take out the trash or let my dog go potty. Shortly after I graduated, some friends (now moved away, employed, and safely housed up!) who were homeless (then as well as when I first met them) moved in with me for a few months when the weather around us was utterly brutal and physically dangerous for them. When it feels safe (and I'm not on my way to appointment), which is pretty often, I stick around to chat a bit when a stranger approaches me to beg or vent about their life or meet my dog or whatever, whether they seem likely to be homeless or not.

I have seen people violently raving to themselves or at passersby, and I have seen people fight viciously over spaces in which to sleep or beg. I've conversed with people who seemed very lucid and insightful in some ways and paranoid or mentally disorganized in others. I have nervously avoided some people who were so agitated and incoherent that it made me feel unsafe. But admittedly, I have not ever lived in a huge city which has truly massive encampments of desperate people.

Over the years, I have talked in depth with people, including presently and formerly homeless people, about housing, employment, physical health, mental health, capitalism, familial rejection/abandonment, drug addiction, etc., and how those things relate to homelessness.

Personally, I think homelessness is a problem that requires a multifaceted approach to make people physically and financially secure, and to embed them in meaningful personal and professional supporting relationships in their communities. I think that approaches to addressing homelessness falling under the broad banner of 'housing first' are humane, scientific, and workable. And to me, access to housing as a public good is indeed way more important than promoting individual ownership of single-family homes (fwiw, like you, I'm a renter who'd rather not be).

But my main point in that remark you're replying to is that it's useless and incredibly tone-deaf to scold someone who is currently struggling with that level of hardship and societal rejection/abandonment for not buying into the prevailing political system, or for having a perspective in which the important similarities between the two parties are more salient than their differences.

Don’t you see the game they’re playing with you? All those things listed in the thread they haven’t passed. It’s not because one party wants it any other party doesn’t. It’s because they both don’t want them and they play the game of “we don’t have enough votes“. It’s like how Obama could’ve codified roe versus wade in the law, but never did.

Sure they're different, my point being people only care about the differences once they've reached a certain comfort level.