Why Britain is the worst on homelessness | Hacker News Reader

Why Britain is the worst on homelessness

ft.com

12 pointstherabbithole12 comments

The temporary accomodation looks like a brutal existence. Often a B&B room, with no cooking facilities. A recall a documentary looking at kids living in these spaces, who were often 'cooking' a tin of baked beans down the back of a radiator - that's all they had access to.

Britain is sliding down on all rankings and measures, and the fact that these people voted for Brexit to make "Britain great again" (which a sizeable portion of the people still support) just shows that for now they are also incapable of dragging them out of the mud.

Probably Britain will be like in a few decades what now are the third-world countries...

Given the same choices the people who voted for Brexit had, who/what you would you have voted for? What do you suspect the outcome would have been as it relates to the matter at hand?

I think it is generally accepted that already when Brexit was up for vote it was known to be a universally bad idea - from a rational point of view. Almost every trustable source of information was clear that, for example, the economic outcome it would lead to would be ... suboptimal.

So, if you were rational it was pretty easy choice that Brexit would be the wrong way to go.

Unfortunately, people are not rational (and, even worse, unwilling to admit not having been rational at the time) and many could be "captured" by all kinds of vague BS that politicians came up with -"take back control"- that sounded as if Brexit would be a good idea. (Actually the UK has less control now of global matters, since they can't shape EUN decisions anymore, the UK has rather given up control - to France and Germany which now dominate EU decision making.)

Obviously FT is British but I think it can be hard to fathom just how grim Britain is. It’s properly cold. Doesn’t really get warm in summer. Of the developed nations on Earth the list of worse places to be homeless is short.

But it gets quite cold in US and Canada too.

The US is a large country and for its lack of health care I reckon it would be worse. Canada is obviously colder.

But Britain is positively grim.

Finland etc? In my expert opinion this Helsinki homeless abode from 2005 was quite functional down to -30°C : https://photos.app.goo.gl/MqwRWdgkN0oynyTw1

I said short list, not no list. Homelessness is more than sleeping rough too.

That is a fantastic picture though.

> The “build more houses” discourse can sometimes feel like the preserve of young professionals and policy wonks, distant from the daily experiences of those on the brink of destitution. This could not be further from the truth. The homelessness crisis is at its heart a crisis of housing supply and affordability, and on both scores Britain fares the worst.

Because when you have generations whose limited thinking is “invest in property,” that’s all they cling to, refusing to accept just how fucking wrong they were. Now they’re sitting on damp houses that are falling to bits, demanding top dollar and refusing to take a penny less because, guess what, “invest in property” is all they have left. No savings. No other assets. No thought of starting a business. They’re just waiting for that big payday in the sky.

So, the housing market is fucked. It’s so out of proportion, it’s unreal. It needs a reset so younger generations can actually afford to live where they want to—whether that’s for family ties, work prospects, or whatever. Now you’ve got self-identifying middle classes who are one month away from the street due to artificially inflated property prices and rising mortgage rates. Like someone said, Britain is failing on every metric at the moment. It’s not solely the government’s fault; people need to look closer to home, pardon the pun.

You’ve got wannabe property developers who can’t even afford their own homes but go around telling everyone to invest in property, parroting that nonsense everywhere they go, dreaming of the day they become property millionaires. They’re just deluded.

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