North Korean dissidents in South Korea disagree strongly with your claim: several of them publicly expressed their shame to see such a rich country failing to fulfill this very basic human need when their super poor communist country of origin had no such problem. Homelessness is a society-wide self-inflected wound: it could be stopped in a few years, but that would be landlord gentry's biggest nightmare.
I think you are making the same mistake as the author of the article. Can you describe the steps necessary to solve homelessness, without resorting to "steps" that simply describe a condition that won't be fulfilled, such as "people have to..." or "the government has to..."?
Or, in other words, let's assume that I want to solve homelessness. What do I have to do for that?
The current money system heavily discourages equilibrium formation, which allows disequilibria like the geographical concentration of money to occur, which in turn make it harder to earn money outside of large city hubs with expensive real estate. It is not possible for these homeless people to move away and earn a living on their own, because it would mean distancing themselves from where the jobs are moving towards. However, even if you make jobs available outside of expensive locations, there are still going to be people who need to live in the expensive location for whatever non job related reason. Those still need a solution to densify the existing location so more people can live there. That is why you need to prevent land owners from extracting benefits created by the collective surrounded the plot of land.
Again, the solution is too obvious for anyone to care about it. We can't demonize people, we can only demonize their ability to do bad things and set the incentives up in such a way that "greedy" people and "morally good" people do the same thing.
If you wanted the same answer in short: Demurrage currencies and land value taxes. Too simple to be believable.
If these two action items are "never going to happen", as you say, then they are not (part of) a solution. Like the author of the article, you have just started mapping the problem.
> If you wanted the same answer in short: Demurrage currencies and land value taxes. Too simple to be believable.
If things are as simple as you claim, why don't you describe a plan to overcome the obstacles and actually implement the two changes you described?
It's all about incentives. Our society is incentivized to make a few people rich, not to solve these sorts of problems. If we wanted to solve them, we would. But that's not profitable, so it's not "worth" it.
Humans never had the technological capabilities we have today, which could solve most, if not all, of these problems. But because of our current economic system we rather spend trillions on advertising instead of reducing human suffering.
It's sad to realize that, unlike any other time in history, we as a society choose to not solve these issues.
Au contraire: not only can he do that, he is (currently) unlikely to be able to do otherwise.
Culture is an extremely powerful force, one that is typically very difficult to detect (culture frowns upon self-criticism, forces the subject to be changed, moderators/experts to step in and enforce the Overton Window to restore order, etc).
I wasn't arguing that the problem is too complex to solve, and in fact I don't see any evidence that it is.
Instead, I am arguing that the replies in this thread who claim that the problem is "simple", "not rocket science" etc. underestimate the problem's complexity, and challenged them to present a solution if they think it is simple.
Build housing would be a great start! Markets don't care about low-profit cheap small apartments, so there's no supply and the demand isn't being met, so it's the mission of the state to step up and compensate this market failure.
Then you can also tax properties based on their occupied land area, which incentives the private sector to build higher density, which is much cheaper in terms of infrastructure cost and cost of living as well.
Then you'll stay with homeless junkies and vets, for which you'll need social workers and dedicated structures, but you could also try fixing your social issues and wage less wars and the number of people to take care of will plummet and become more similar to what you can find in other developed countries.
Let's start here. What are the steps needed to get the state to do this? Is the money for it taken from other places, or by increasing the deficit, or by raising taxes? How do you convince other politicians of your plan? Where is the land taken from?
Again, this seems only like a first step in mapping the problem.
If you agree to the end goal, you can pick whatever answer you like to your financing question, it's not really more important than “what color should the buildings be” as the cost would be a small fraction of say IRA or the yearly defense budget, or Trump's tax cuts.
The legitimate question being: what to do with the plutocracy, and to that question I'm afraid I don't think you Americans will see democracy ever again untill you are willing to get back to your revolutionary roots and take it (or at least make the oligarchs scared enough to give up part of the power, which is the best case scenario TBH).
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding in this discussion, because to me it seems like we're jumping from "this is really simple" to "it can't be done" and back. Which is it -- is it simple, or is it so complex that it's impossible?
1. Many problems, including homelessness, are relatively straightforward to solve for a willing State entity in a developed country. Everyone in power that says otherwise is simply lying. This is the “this is really simple” part.
2. The people that get elected and are ruling are not willing to fix these problems. And the reason they aren't is that it's really hard for someone who is willing to actually get elected because of the plutocratic nature of the system. This is the “really hard” part. It's not that it's complex, it's that the interest of the people is fighting against the ideology and economic interests of the ones who have the political power to get someone elected.
See, there's no contradiction at all, and reminding people that “yes, we can in fact have nice things” is actually a political strategy to try overcome #2.
In Finland at least this was (mostly) solved by, you know, giving homeless people homes. Ones owned by municipalities. Decided by elected representatives. Who were elected by voters who care about more than their own ass on this quarter.
This is really not rocket science or fusion power stuff.
Or, in case you were referring to Finland's solution being a solution "template" for the US, what are the steps to implement that solution in the US?