And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises.
And even in a society that forces those people into attempted treatment programs, there will still be a bit of time in between their issues manifesting and them going into treatment/therapy/confinement.
To have “zero homeless” you’d need to preventatively intercept these people before they become homeless and force them into confinement in treatment facilities and mental hospitals essentially. And that’s a dangerous game because you’re essentially taking away someone’s freedom preemptively before they become homeless
But the idea that jails are an unadulterated societal good, or that they are the natural only option to police, is a crazy religion. Why on earth do we have no timely resolutions but through handcuffs and jail? There is expediency, and then there is externalizing the whole of the troubles to the smallest number of people, who could never overturn a majority, even if they had the vote.
I suggest the ability to put certain people in a metal box, at least partially for losing their grasp of a better role in the world, is a big, boldface moral hazard, and self-perpetuating, but with leering cheerleaders.
Some people are wild and out of control sometimes. Treating them all as permanent bad apples is just as animalistic.
So? Why can't a 21st century country provide them with some at-least pod-like homes, so they are not fucking homeless?
Like some housing that was built to be closer to "indestructible" than "nice" and was small, like 200 - 300 sq ft.
That was absolutely free, $0?
>Like some housing that was built to be closer to "indestructible" than "nice" and was small, like 200 - 300 sq ft.
We already have those housing units. They have concrete "beds", toilet-sink combos made out of stainless steel, and a thick steel door that can't be burned by arson. Nothing flammable is allowed within them (save the non-homeless person). The technology exists, and the homeless are actually welcome there. People get mad when they are homed thus, though.
Mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness all exist in a range. There are many people who are homeless, mentally ill or addicted to drugs who still have some amount of income of one type or the other.
I would try to target rent under $1,000 per month for such housing
In the United States, ~40% of the homeless are employed. A deeply non-trivial percent either are kids or have kids. Everyone should volunteer at a support center for homeless youth some time.
Sure, there may be some kind of Pareto principal in play for the hardest 20% of cases to crack. Who cares? Let's eliminate 80% of the existing problem and worry about the rest when we get there.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the median HN reader has very little appreciation of the human reality of homelessness in the United States, and primarily see it through the lens of people at the extreme, visible margins. I know I used to until I got involved.
edit: I mean all of this in a very boring, matter of fact way, not some kind of holier-than-thou virtue signaling way. The 80% problem of homelessness is a tractable economic problem. While it's true that the United States has an almost dizzying level of propaganda demonizing poor people, it's also true that real homelessness is hard to spot because people have a natural instinct to preserve their and their family's dignity. The first time I came to terms with this was coaching debate in highschool. I had a varsity debater who couldn't afford pants to meet the dress code. Incredibly bright, academically successful kid. His father was an unemployed teacher working menial jobs, his mother was taking care of three kids. They lived in a tent at campsites. I had absolutely no idea. We obviously bought him pants and paid all his travel/etc. fees (he'd been making excuses to not go to events requiring travel). That's a very boring, normal case.
That family should have had a free or nearly free housing option. They did not. They still wouldn't.
Many of these people, and not just the really, really bad nuisance ones people use as excuses to superiority, are literally slaves, performing the scarecrow work of deterrence as living examples, for "society", for no pay.
I think this is an injustice, subverted by its own cruelty, and one of the more compelling arguments for UBI.
The example is true, but to your point, isn't representative... and that doesn't matter.
My point was that there is a bottom some-percent of homeless people that can’t immediately be helped.
But yeah I think I made my point clear in the second paragraph that we need the resources to provide housing and basic necessities for the majority of homeless people who are able to receive it, though I probably should’ve clarified that those benefits should be tiered and someone who just goes through a terrible point in life and is otherwise in a reasonably healthy place should have easy access to something decent.
I understand that you cannot reason too well with an addict, so it might be surprising to some that somebody would refuse shelter if it meant being clean.
Still, what should be the approach then? Unconditional help?
I think it's a tough problem to solve: how far should we help drug addict in their addiction? Is the goal to help them survive, help them stop using drugs, help them find a job?
Depending on the metrics you will find that unconditional housing is more effective (ex: https://www.utoronto.ca/news/housing-first-more-effective-tr...) or offering incentives to stop is more effective (ex: https://www.chcs.org/resource/contingency-management-for-adu...)
It's a very fine line, between authoritarianism and the freedom of someone (whatever their mental state/ability is) to chose to not have a permanent place to live, while going through a difficult or promising phase of life. See also "The Pursuit of Happyness"
Can you, though? And for how long? With the current policymaking and demographic and economic trends?
There is an argument to be made that the European social experiment has largely been indirectly funded by the largesse of the American hard-and-soft power strategy. As we're moving away from that (for various reasons, most idiotic), there is a question as to how it will persist.
(This is not meant as trolling--there's a real existential question here. A starting point is an attack on that argument: what is the "natural" expenditure on defense versus what you can get away with America's force projection? How much social funding is derived from that delta, in the most generous sense? Maybe it's a red-herring.)
If we are speaking about housing specifically, at my part of the swamp it's subsidises by more affluent people (they way our atheistic christian beliefs command) and the general idea predates the rise of America anyway. Dealing with homeless people and the like the European way is also /cheaper/ too, IRRC.
Not having crack junkies shit in my front and backyard and also not worrying about it is tax money well I believe.. It's up to the village council to decide to send coppers to beat them or medics to provide some free hits on a condition of having to take a shower.
This whole charade in the USA of dressing up slavery (without even a single day of interruption on January 31, 1865) as "correction" is absurd. It's obviously a way to continue an economy that relies on a supply of involuntary labor, and has nothing whatsoever to do with public safety.
There are plenty of ways to implement restorative justice which are superior to forcing convicts to make starbucks uniforms (start here if you've never delved into this, but there are great books on the topic which you can find from here: https://harvardpolitics.com/restorative-justice-abolition/).
But the question is: just because some perpetrators don't deserve second chances, why does that mean that McDonalds and Raytheon get to be the beneficiary of their free labor?
And more importantly: with a huge economic incentive to enslave ("imprison"... eye roll) these people, can we ever actually have a system that properly selects people who actually need to be removed from society?
If prisons are actually a viable mechanism for public safety, let's amend the 13th amendment to prohibit all slavery, instead of allowing it to exist in prisons, and then we'll get a clearer picture.
To me, the idea that incarceration and police use of force is wrong because it is racist is backwards. It’s racist because it is wrong.
Obviously you will not reach that literally. That's why it is an ideal number, not a real number. It is still a good and worthy goal.
Finnland for example has nearly eradicated homelessness. It is not literally zero but 0.08% which is pretty good.
You can also reduce the crime rate dramatically by better social security, education, easier access to mental health care and so many other things.
And don't say we can't afford these things. These measures pay dividends in building a better society for everyone. What we can't afford is having so many billionaires not paying their fair share.
If we had Finland's winters, I think we could eradicate homelessness by January.
And no, please educate yourself on what Finland did to eradicate homelessness. It has nothing to do climate but with the fact that Finland made it an explicit political goal to eradicate it i.e political will.
Finland did something, but "eradicating homelessness" wasn't what they did. It has nothing to do with political will in the case of the United States, and everything to do with a grab-bag of leftist policies that are entirely incompatible. Even if we were to ignore those who are plainly unfit to live in a home from the score, the remainder can't be housed while you import millions of immigrants to compete with them for housing. You can have one or the other of those two things, but they are mutually incompatible. And that's before you even get to the people so broken that they complain that they want to be homeless, to be vagabonds, living out of tents in alleys and panhandling. Such people exist. Sometimes they even manage to show up online and say as much, so you can't claim perfect ignorance here.
The addicts and the mentally ill that used to be institutionalized and whatever else can be said about them, they had a roof over their heads, do you want to bring back the big thorazine zombie warehouses? We could eradicate that homelessness. Is that your plan? I'm not even necessarily against it, but I do get a big kick out of the left that can't even bring themselves to say the words out loud.
Finland is a dying nation with a fertility rate below 1.5. As they continue to shrink, they might manage to have so many surplus homes that homelessness is eliminated... or they might import a bunch of immigrants that put pressure on housing. They might decide that they can't forego military spending with Russia next door, in which case the social spending they're doing won't be necessarily as affordable. Especially if Trump screws NATO with finality. "Please educate yourself"... god, you people. No wonder you lose elections.