But if you give houses to the homeless, they will no longer be homeless and who am I going to look down on now?
And what else will I complain about when I go downtown? I want to be able to complain about how we need to clean the riffraff of the streets, but it gives me no joy if we’re actually getting them off the streets! I need something to fucking whinge about!
Most people who complain about downtowns never go there anyways.
Exactly. I fucking live downtown and I have more to complain about businesses that operate down here than the damn homeless.
The only “thugs” I ever see downtown is the posse of ten cops it takes to shoo one homeless person out of a park.
COP = Criminals On Patrol
I also live downtown, and my primary issues are homeless stealing things off our front porch, the neighbors that think every night is a good fireworks night, and the 2 homes that previously had 6 scruffy lookin guys hanging out in front of them for months that are now in cinders.
Well if the homeless are off the streets, then the turtles and rats can come back out of the sewers. Go rant at Splinter
The bourgeoisie requires a risk of destitution to prevent the proletariat from rising up.
My nipples get erect when I flick them.
There is already orders of magnitude more housing than unhoused people- the problem is that the market is involved and that requires winners and losers.
That’s why you have people dying of exposure in the richest country in the history of the world. God damn america.
G-give…away? N-n-no money for me?? But money me, now. Money now. Money! House = money! Empty house, no money is ok, full house no money NOT OK!
CoMmUnIsM!!!
-Landleeches
Land of the free. Free to sleep under any bridge that isn’t spiked.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”
-Anatole France
Beautiful
Throw in unaddressed mental health and drug crises.
Not only that - they’re dying in the street immediately adjacent to vacant luxury condos.
Are the homeless people where the empty homes are? That’s the concern I have. There are really cheap empty houses throughout the country, but the homeless are congregate in large groups in some of the most expensive states/cities in the country. I dont think there are that many empty homes in San Francisco that are available for rent/purchase that are just being left empty for months at a time.
Where are people sourcing that information from?
It’s off the aggregate numbers. I’m sure that there’s a lot of useless suburban sprawl pumping the numbers up. The “most efficient system” is an abject failure when it comes to housing people unless the only metric you care about is revenue generation for shithead inheritors.
“but who will pay for it?1!?1?!1?”
The government
“But then my taxes are going to do some good! That can’t be!!!”
if you give houses to homeless people indiscrimately, many of those houses will be uninhabitable in 2 years. What do you do then? Give them another house to wreck?
Got any sources on that claim, or are you just assuming homeless people are inherently incapable of taking care of themselves?
https://nypost.com/2020/06/27/san-franciscos-failed-experiment-of-homeless-hotels-is-a-cautionary-tale/ https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/la-hotel-converted-to-homeless-housing-suffers-11-5-million-in-damages/ https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/08/30/homeless-squatters-trash-casper-hotel-getting-out-of-hand-mayor-says/
Leaving these literature reviews on housing first policy here for those who want to form their own opinion instead of getting it from right-wing “news” articles:
https://jech.bmj.com/content/jech/73/5/379.full.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4679128/
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25133/chapter/1
https://www.coloradocoalition.org/sites/default/files/2017-01/287.pdf
None of these articles discuss failures of a housing first policy, and they all seem to focus on the same single hotel.
Leaving these literature reviews on housing first policy here for those who want to form their own opinion instead of getting it from right-wing “news” articles:
https://jech.bmj.com/content/jech/73/5/379.full.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4679128/
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25133/chapter/1
https://www.coloradocoalition.org/sites/default/files/2017-01/287.pdf
Housing first is a proven strategy in dealing with homelessness. The fact that every state has not adopted these policies to help eliminate the homeless population shows this is more a cultural issue than a lack of housing.
According to the Census there are a lot more empty houses than homeless people. Let that sink in and you start to realize all is not what it seems.
Until someone is safe and has their basic needs met it is impossible to work on issues such as mental health and addiction.
The solution exists but it is going to take a lot of our time, money, and most importantly a cultural shift away from blaming people to accomplish it.
If we could fix our homelessness then we would show that we truly care about our citizens rather than just paying a lip service to our most vulnerable people.
According to the Census there are a lot more empty houses than homeless people. Let that sink in and you start to realize all is not what it seems.
This particular statistic needs to be handled carefully. There are problems with both its definition and its nature. Empty housing has a fairly broad definition that includes housing that is unfinished, in the middle of repairs, or unfit for habitation.
The nature of housing with relationship to homelessness depends a lot on where the homeless people are and where the housing is. Empty housing in towns and cities that are depopulating is unlikely to be all that useful. Simply taking people from cities with high levels of homelessness, ripping them out of their communities, and plopping them down into communities that other people are leaving is not a favor.
Also, you shouldn’t just warehouse unhoused people in whatever housing is available. Many of them have mental illnesses that need good access to mental health services, transit, and jobs. Just because they’re under a roof doesn’t mean the job is done. The housing should be tailored to the various populations that it will be serving.
I encourage you to lookup up Housing First if you have not already. While it may be misleading to say there are 16 million vacant home to half a million homeless people (32 homes for every homeless person), for the reasons you mentioned, it is entirely possible house these people.
No one who knows about this issue is thinking about warehousing people. Like you said they need a stable place to live, access to services, transportation, and work when they are ready.
I’m familiar with Housing First. I mostly just didn’t want to see a misleading use of statistics left unchallenged. Statistics around housing are difficult to grasp, so I often see them used in a misleading way, usually unknowingly.
Take one statistic, the rental vacancy rate in my city, Portland. It has lately been around 4%. Given the number of homeless people in the city, that feels like a travesty. But when you start to do calculations, that turns out to be an average of 2 weeks every four years. If you have tenants moving out after four years, that’s barely enough time to do a few repairs, let the paint dry, and finding new tenants. What seemed like a loose market turns out to be a very tight market.
Don’t forget the Homeless Jesus statues that take up and entire bench so no one can sleep on them.
Ah, another “He Gets Us” moment.
“Jesus was homeless for a time (supposedly), so it’s fine for them to be homeless!” ☺️
Housing + mental healthcare. Without mental healthcare you’d just be proving these NIMBYs right.
(sees username)
Housing + universal healthcare
I understand this building in downtown Vancouver probably had issues with people sleeping here, but placing a bunch of concrete filled pylons is fucked up.
Sledgehammer time. Looks like fun.
Smashing it to pieces is good practice
Acupuncture bed.
That’s fucking shocking
A thicc soft mattress can easily fix that
Homeless exist to remind the rest of the serfs that they better go back to the coal mine or they’ll end up just like them.
And police exist to keep them suppressed, disorganized and desperate
not really, more like they exist to help prevent people from getting stabbed from a meth addicted homeless person who is convinced you are satan trying to steal their soul
80’s crime world movies are fascist propaganda by the way. This person is demonstrating how popular culture is also political.
There is a such thing as a crazy madman killer in our society. They’re called school shooters, and they live in the suburbs. The cartoon that exists in this person’s head about what homelessness is and who it’s a danger to didn’t come out of thin air.
80’s crime world movies are fascist propaganda by the way.
We’ve really turned the word “fascist propaganda” to mean anything that goes against your worldview. There are definitely crazed homeless people who do not care one bit about committing needless violence. I’ve experienced it first hand. Back when I lived in NYC there were some of the absolutely most deranged people I’ve ever seen in my life, one guy stabbed a indian knick knack stall owner with a piece of glass for legitimately no reason. The guy almost died. It is what it is, but I think burying your head in the sand is not really a viable way forward.
Wow. This format is actually put to good use here.
Well, to be fair there are indeed enough houses… We kinda just assumed they would, by the grace of the market, end up distributed among virtually all people and at a fair price. The reason they never did and increasingly don’t is one of the largest unsolved problems in economics /s
We know what the problem is, and how to solve it. The people in charge just don’t want it solved.
This is so weird, isn’t it? I reran the model thousand times, it can’t be wrong! I mean, what’s supposed to be wrong? The assumptions? That’s ridiculous! Let me readjust the factors once more…
The houses aren’t in the right place where people need them, however. Where are there millions of unoccupied homes in California, Oregon and Washington?
Oregon alone is short something like 150,000 housing units. I can’t ever recall seeing an empty house that stayed vacant for very long.
Spend some taxpayer money on renovating abandoned shopping malls into housing for the homeless
Not exactly doable since living spaces legally must have egress windows, and shopping malls… Don’t really have many outer walls for that compared to the amount of space internally they have
Greatest meme. series problem.
I mean houses cost money, and we know the government don’t like spending in the first place, they just worried about public image not the root of the problem
“Overwatch, deploying spikes.”
