
The New American Homeless - mooreds
https://newrepublic.com/article/154618/new-american-homeless-housing-insecurity-richest-cities
======
rcpt
A San Franciscan figured it all out over one hundred years ago

[http://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp23.htm](http://www.henrygeorge.org/pchp23.htm)

> THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social phenomena that
> have appalled philanthropists and perplexed statesmen all over the civilized
> world. We have found the reason why wages constantly tend to a minimum,
> giving but a bare living, despite increase in productive power:

> _As productive power increases, rent tends to increase even more —
> constantly forcing down wages._

> Advancing civilization tends to increase the power of human labor to satisfy
> human desires. We should be able to eliminate poverty. But workers cannot
> reap these benefits because they are intercepted. Land is necessary to
> labor. When it has been reduced to private ownership, the increased
> productivity of labor only increases rent. Thus, all the advantages of
> progress go to those who own land. Wages do not increase — wages cannot
> increase. The more labor produces, the more it must pay for the opportunity
> to make anything at all.

~~~
simplecomplex
Sounds nice but the devil is in the details. Land value tax would be
determined arbitrarily not by the market. It’s sounds great if you ignore the
problem of actually assessing unimproved land value.

Of course we know “value” is just the amount of money someone traded for
something, so Georgism can’t be implemented practically.

When you stop thinking about how awesome LVT is and think about how to
calculate it, the whole theory falls apart.

~~~
rcpt
This sounds like an argument to abolish all property taxes. No?

Land value assessments should be easier than typical property assessments
(which take into account land value already), cf
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Assessment/ap...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax#Assessment/appraisal)

~~~
simplecomplex
Pretty much. An assessor can write down any assessment they want. All assessed
value taxes have this problem. The value I attribute to something can only be
objectively defined by a market transaction. And more importantly, people
attribute different values to the same thing.

This is simple to illustrate by example: Three people are willing to buy the
same property at different maximum prices. Person A is willing to buy at $35k,
person B at $30k, and person C at $25k. Any value an assessor writes down will
necessarily be different than one of the three people. There is no dollar
value intrinsic to the property itself.

~~~
rcpt
So, because land value assessments are easier than property assessments, we
should get a smaller margin of error by switching to a LVT. This is good.

Your other point seems to be that no margin of error is acceptable and we
should therefore ditch the whole thing.

It's not clear that the societal pain from somewhat inaccurate tax assessments
is great enough that we should just set everything to 0. We have lots of data
that 0 property tax leads to housing shortages and rampant speculation (cf.
Malta for an example) and if you don't tax land ownership you often end up
taxing something productive, like income.

~~~
simplecomplex
Margin of error? I don’t think you understand me.

There can’t be a margin of error because there is no dollar value inherent to
land (or anything). Margin of error compared to what?

People attribute different values to the same property, which is not reflected
in any sort of assessed value.

I’ll explain with a question: If I say a property is worth $30k and you say
it’s worth $100k what should the assessed value be?

~~~
rcpt
> there is no dollar value inherent to land (or anything)

There's "intrinsic value" which is different from the "market value". I'm not
very familiar with finance so I'm not sure if this is what you you're getting
at.

But your idea, that land can't be taxed because it has no value, can't
possibly be new as these questions have been around for literally hundreds of
years. That being said, I've never heard it before and would be genuinely
interested if you can link some papers or books.

~~~
simplecomplex
> There's "intrinsic value" which is different from the "market value".

If there is, then how would I calculate the intrinsic value of a piece of real
estate, to levy a tax on it?

See
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_value](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_value)
vs
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value)

------
esotericn
I don't think that renting housing at a market rate, and letting those who
can't afford it become subhuman, is a sensible model for an economy.

It works for the mobile wealthy, sure. I'll effectively never have to worry
about paying for the rent unless I decided to move to like, Manhattan, and
probably a ton of HN readers won't either.

It works way better I think to give people a small plot of land, build them a
basic house, and let them crack on with it. It's much better for someone to
end up with a home in a state of disrepair and have to figure that out, than
have a literal lord turf them out. Give a man a fish vs. teach them how to,
that sort of thing.

An apartment could also work though the legal structure is a bit more
difficult.

To put it another way - people who have literally zero capital are capital-F
fucked. You can only ever apply a series of band-aids to that sort of
situation, you can't actually fix it.

The poorest people I've seen in council housing or in more rural areas have a
hell of a lot more dignity than someone bouncing from apartment to apartment
in an expensive city despite potentially being in "poverty" statistically.

In brief - renting is financialization, if you don't have enough Money Points,
you go and die. Simple, right?

~~~
randomdata
_> I don't think that renting housing at a market rate, and letting those who
can't afford it become subhuman, is a sensible model for an economy._

I disagree. The entire urbanization movement took place because housing became
less and less affordable in rural areas, where the vast majority of the
population was living. That push into urban areas, and everything that went
along with executing that growth, brought us the best economic times we've
ever seen.

Housing became less and less affordable in rural areas because the people
weren't needed there anymore. If we had provided some model to allow people to
stay where they really wanted to, which, for most people, is close to friends
and family, despite the lack of need for them the economy would have cratered.
We are entering a similar time for dense urban areas, where there are more
people than there is need for them to be there.

The best thing for the economy is to have them leave to where they are now
needed in 2019. However, we can agree that, generally speaking, people don't
like to move. They prefer to stay close to friends and family. That is the
issue upon us, balancing the needs of the economy and the needs of the
humanities.

~~~
maxerickson
Didn't rural living become relatively less attractive more than it became
unaffordable?

Like, people weren't driven off by land prices, they just went to work in
cities because the income was much more attractive.

~~~
randomdata
Sure. We may talk like it is a binary issue, affordable or unaffordable, for
simplicity, but reality is a spectrum. There are people who can easily afford
to live somewhere, there are also people who can afford to live there but are
on the cusp of it being unaffordable, and there are those who truly cannot
afford it. Colloquially we may refer to those who are only the cusp of
unaffordable as being among those who are actually in an unaffordable
situation.

Nevertheless, no matter how you want to categorize things, it remains that
some simply could not afford to live in rural areas. Along with the
urbanization movement came the growth of farms. If you have a parcel of land
that an actual farmer wants to grow his farming business with, how are you
going to compete if all you have a lowly job in town with no particular need
for that land beyond wanting to live there? He wants and needs it a lot more
than you do.

It's not a whole lot different today. A single plot of farmland will sell for
well over a million dollars these days. Unless you have significant wealth
behind your name, how would you ever begin to afford that, unless you actually
have plans to farm it and can roll the cost as a cost of doing business? To
simply buy the property to live on? Not going to happen.

------
seibelj
In this situation it’s really hard to blame corporations for all the problems
when the key issue - zoning restrictions that prevent the construction of
dense, low-income housing - is entirely caused by the government and by
extension the people who elect them.

Allow developers the freedom to build huge apartment buildings and the housing
crisis will be severely mitigated. The answer from the left is always more
taxes, more government, more red tape and it blinds them to the true problem.

~~~
im_down_w_otp
It's worth noting that most housing developers need to be prompted and
incentivized pretty aggressively to build affordable housing in high-value
areas even when they're allowed by law to do so.

Usually what happens is they raise or borrow a bunch of money to build much
higher margin housing (e.g. hip condos instead of affordable apartments) until
the market is saturated with still more unaffordable housing.

Without explicit incentive structures or requirements like, "You must build X
number of affordable units for every Y number of luxury units." things tend to
stay pretty broken.

~~~
rukittenme
> It's worth noting that most housing developers need to be prompted and
> incentivized pretty aggressively to build affordable housing in high-value
> areas even when they're allowed by law to do so.

No car company produces cars for people living on the minimum wage and yet a
great many people living on the minimum wage can and do afford cars. Building
new housing reduces the value of existing housing.

~~~
mgkimsal
cars have much shorter lifecycle than housing, are mobile, much smaller, and
get replaced far more often than housing.

~~~
learc83
Cars also depreciate and aren't seen as an investment.

~~~
im_down_w_otp
Indeed. This gets at the root of the problem. Housing can't be both affordable
and a great investment at the same time. The latter requires high (and
increasing) asset value which eventually precludes the former being
increasingly affordable.

The problem with housing is a lot deeper rooted than basic Econ 101 supply &
demand models can address.

------
jandrewrogers
The "127 hours worked at Federal minimum wage to afford the median rent" is an
abuse of statistics in service of a narrative. Literally 50% of all rentals
are _less expensive_ , and presumably a poor person would be living in one of
those. How many hours for the 20th percentile rent? That would actually be
insightful.

I wonder how many hours of minimum wage I would need to work to afford a new
BMW.

~~~
coldtea
> _The "127 hours worked at Federal minimum wage to afford the median rent" is
> an abuse of statistics in service of a narrative. Literally 50% of all
> rentals are less expensive_

There are tons of poor people making less than minimum wage (working less than
8 hours or on/off days/gigs (and still not counted as unemployed because of
those).

People also need to pay way more than the rent alone (food, utilities,
children, commuting, health costs, and so on).

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
Working less than 8 hours doesn't mean you're making less than minimum wage if
your hourly rate is minimum wage. If you take gigs that work out to a lower
hourly rate than minimum wage, that's a different story though.

~~~
coldtea
> _Working less than 8 hours doesn 't mean you're making less than minimum
> wage if your hourly rate is minimum wage._

It means you're making less than 8 * minimum hourly wage each day, so those
127 hours stretch to even more than 15 days of your working month.

------
127
You can't make a law that orders people to care about each other. From an
outside view it looks a lot like the erosion of a previously high-trust
society. Possibly caused by middle-class economic woes. Those who want to
build a family and are not rich have been gutted by various dynamics.

------
lacker
The start of this article pains me.

 _Housing insecurity in the nation’s richest cities is far worse than
government statistics claim. Just ask the Goodmans._

Is the target audience people that explicitly think anecdotes are more
important than data? I preferred it when that cognitive error was at least
hidden.

~~~
refurb
That’s the status quo when it comes to journalism today.

Do an in depth analysis of the data and talk to experts with varied opinions?
Nah....

Find an anecdote that pulls at the heart strings and use vague language to
insinuate it’s a “crisis”? We have a story!!

~~~
wuschb
The lack of empathy in North American culture is part of the problem. You
complain when they make it personal, pointing out individual problems is how
you effect change.

------
DenisM
It appears to me now that we need more than one word to describe the various
kinds of homeless: one group of mentally ill/drug addicts that can’t keep it
together under best circumstances, one group that might just need
education/training to get into the groove, one group that’s priced out by
urbanization despite holding a proper job, one group that actually likes their
freedom.

Lumping the four groups together creates a great deal of confusion - you can
often find people arguing that homeless need more homes vs homeless need job
training vs mental health care etc. We’re just talking about different people.

~~~
readams
The chronically homeless are almost all in the mental illness/drug abuse
category. The ones that just need training and/or already have a job and are
priced out can access lots of services, move, and otherwise find a way out.

~~~
DenisM
The topic article describes exactly the kind of people who are well-adjusted
and yet could not find a way out.

------
hourislate
I'm not judging but there are 6 kids in that picture. How in the world is she
going to manage in the first place with a minimum wage job? I'm surprised she
can even afford to feed and cloth them never mind rent.

These kids don't have a chance without a lot of luck. I can only imagine not
having a husband or a solid family (brother, sisters, aunts, uncles, etc)
makes things more difficult with no one to give a helping hand.

I just want to ask where the fuck is the father in all of this and why isn't
he helping?

~~~
bittercynic
That was covered in the article. He was abusive, so she and the kids left.

~~~
hourislate
Well that is fine but his responsibilities still exist and he is a sack of
shit for not helping to support the kids.

~~~
bittercynic
I agree that not helping to support your kids is extremely shitty, but that
wasn't the most important part of the article for me.

Two of the children were abandoned by their parents, and the mother in this
story adopted them. She earns her living doing work that seems to be an
unambiguously positive contribution to society, and takes on extra
responsibilities (in the form of two entire human beings).

The article paints a picture of a woman who is generous, hardworking, and
disciplined, and who is getting absolutely crushed by the modern economy. That
seems like a very real story to me, and a mandate to make some serious
changes, even if they put a dent in the wealth of some wealthier people.

------
DoreenMichele
I can't make it through this article. I know what the point is supposed to to
be, but it probably will fall on deaf ears. The prejudice against the homeless
runs too deep, the desire to justify that prejudice and insist it isn't merely
shitty behavior deeper still.

I am probably two or three generations removed from low level German nobility.
I was one of the top students of my graduating high school class. I won (and
turned down) a National Merit Scholarship to one of the top two universities
in my state.

My father retired from the military as an E-8, a fairly high rank. I was a
military wife for about two decades. The ex also retired as an E-8.

I got divorced and got a corporate job at a Fortune 500 company, the biggest
non military employer in my home town at the time. While I had that job, I
would make small talk at eateries or the like and people would ooh and aah
that I worked at Aflac, having no idea what I did. I had an entry level job I
couldn't get promoted out of, but locals acted like I was clearly part or the
privileged few to work there at all.

Then I quit to go live in a tent for health reasons. That long personal
history of always being respected and accomplished and one of the privileged
few in whatever circles I ran in was no protection from the prejudice against
the homeless. It did seemingly nothing to get me taken seriously, respected or
result in real help to resolve my problems.

I'm not sure it makes any difference for me to leave this remark. HN is a
bastion of goodness compared to everything else, yet still is part of the
problem. It seems to mostly just harm my reputation to talk about
homelessness, not convince other people that there are systemic issues
grinding people beneath its boot.

The only winning move is to not get ground under that boot. After it has
marked you, the entire world will heap abuse upon you, deny you real help and
tell you, clearly, you are a junkie or crazy.

I'm quite tired of the entire thing. I increasingly want desperately to just
be free of this shit and maybe that means I should just care less about
injustice in the world and worry more about covering my own ass. "The World"
certainly doesn't give a rat's ass about me or remedying any of the actual
injustice in my life.

I increasingly hate articles like this. They do an even suckier job than I do
of making that point and often just give ammunition to the people of the world
who want to blame those whose lives don't work. ("Maybe she shouldn't have had
six kids!!" Etc ad nauseum.)

~~~
esotericn
> I'm quite tired of the entire thing. I increasingly want desperately to just
> be free of this shit and maybe that means I should just care less about
> injustice in the world and worry more about covering my own ass. "The World"
> certainly doesn't give a rat's ass about me or remedying any of the actual
> injustice in my life.

A level of this is absolutely necessary because there's too much wrong in the
world.

I used to think a lot about how to solve the issues in my community growing
up. I often wonder - could I go back there and help? I have more money now, I
know more, etc.

But realistically, I'm one person, and too small, and I don't _really_ know
what's going on. All I can do is try not to exacerbate the issues.

And yeah, the world doesn't care about you, or me. You're a chicken in a farm
and someone's about to lop your head off for a sandwich. So it goes.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_But realistically, I 'm one person, and too small, and I don't _really_ know
what's going on._

I'm just one person. I've researched this problem space for many years. I had
a class on Homelessness and Public Policy well before I ended up homeless.

I think I have some good ideas, but I can't get traction because people with
money and power don't actually take me seriously, either online or in meat
space.

I wrote this recently and submitted it to HN.

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-small-
tow...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-small-town-with-
big-city-problems.html)

I think it got one upvote. So I'm pretty fed up and feeling like it won't get
fixed precisely because people actively want it to not be fixed, not because
it can't be fixed.

I'm a subject matter expert. It doesn't matter. People just want to keep
justifying the status quo and calling homeless people junkies and crazies.

Having been homeless, obviously, I'm crazy. No need to listen to fuck all I
say, clearly.

~~~
wuschb
Vilifying the poor is part of the divide and conquer strategy of the ultra
wealthy. They rely on us having a enemy other than them.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Although I am extremely frustrated with a number of things, I do not think
this is true in most cases. Of course, you find awful people at all levels of
society, but I think most rich people genuinely don't understand the needs of
the poor, don't have good opportunities to really get a clue and a lot of what
they do falls much more under the idea of "Never attribute to malice what can
be readily explained by stupidity" \-- only substitute _ignorance_ for
_stupidity._

One of the reasons I run my big fat mouth on the topic is because I do have a
much more privileged background than I understood for most of my life, so I
have the opportunity to bridge that gap to some degree.

I wish to hell and back that it wasn't such a slog of an endless uphill
battle. I'm tired of my life being such a drag and of feeling so burdened,
etc.

But I'm really not down with simply vilifying "rich people" in a broad-brush
fashion. I see that as a lazy answer and a counterproductive answer.

I'm fine with calling out specific instances, commenting on known track
records of individuals, etc. I'm not fine with "those people" are "just bad
people."

If nothing else, it's a _pot calling the kettle black_ kind thing and I abhor
hypocrisy.

------
hprotagonist
_She suspected the shock had been caused by exposed wiring in the basement,
where there was a pool of standing water. In some states, she could have
withheld her rent until these safety issues were addressed. Georgia granted
tenants no such rights. Nothing prohibited landlords from kicking a renter out
for reporting hazardous conditions to the authorities, what’s referred to as
“retaliatory eviction.”_

There’s nothing about this that’s OK.

~~~
teddyh
You cut off the quote too soon. The very next sentence is “ _(A state law
banning such practices has since passed.)_ ”.

Stop making outrage-generating posts like this by cutting off relevant
information.

~~~
hprotagonist
So “she got the boot but we passed a law 100 years too late that might stop
half of this problem but still won’t let you withhold rent for unsafe housing”
is supposed to be OK?

~~~
teddyh
> _So “[fake quote containing strawman opinion about rents]” is supposed to be
> OK_

I said nothing about this, despite your insidious insinuation. I’m saying that
taking a quote out of context and/or altering it by cutting off a very
relevant bit in order to make it more outrage-inducing _is bad_. Or, to emply
your rhethoric, is any amount of misleading and lying in order to induce rage
in readers, as long as it’s rage about the “right” thing, supposed to be OK?

------
wayanon
I’ve heard it firsthand from someone working with the homeless that some are
offered places to live but prefer the street. It’s a mental health crisis as
much as it’s about available housing.

~~~
DoreenMichele
That assumes that _any_ housing is better than living in a tent. That assumes
that _any_ deal that gets you into _any_ housing is a good deal, or at least
not worse than sleeping under the stars.

Those assumptions are unwarranted.

------
bb101
I remember watching the 1988 film _God Bless the Child_ [1] with Mare
Winningham as the hardworking yet impoverished mother trying to keep it
together for her young daughter. It was so moving, I cried all the way through
it and it has left a life-long impression.

So sad to see not much has changed in 30 years.

[1]
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095227/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095227/)

------
wuschb
Owner occupied property taxes tied to local minimum wage. Price real estate
speculators out of the equation.

------
burlesona
This was an interesting read, but very slanted. It largely lost me here:

> Most advocates agree, however, that lasting change will come only through
> massive government reinvestment in low-income housing, livable wages
> (including pay protections for the growing number of gig workers), and an
> openness to alternative models, such as community land trusts and limited-
> equity cooperatives. The fruit of the laissez-faire approach—deregulating
> the private market and hoping that, with enough new construction,
> affordability will trickle down—can be seen, they suggest, in the hundreds
> of thousands of Americans doubled up or living in shelters and tent cities.

The idea that we currently have a free market approach to housing is absurdly
wrong. We haven’t had anything close to free market conditions in housing for
generations, mostly since the FDR administration created the federal mess of
agencies to commoditize housing in the first place. This is perhaps the single
most important myth that needs to be dispelled. When it takes years to get
permission to build an apartment, and 80-90% of the average US city’s land is
restricted to single family houses on large lots, that anyone can think we
have a “liassez-faire” system is shameful.

Of course homeless advocates, who are largely paid by government programs,
think that the problems created by too much government would be best solved by
more government.

Earlier in the article the author cited a large scale research effort which
came to a much simpler conclusion:

> Kozol condensed his findings into a single italicized sentence: “The cause
> of homelessness,” he wrote, “is lack of housing.”

This, it seems, people are finally beginning to understand. But still there is
so much vilification if developers and landlords, which I believe gets in the
way of progress.

The system is deeply broken, and the majority of the individual players in it
are honest people trying to follow the rules as they’ve been given, trying to
do something they believe is good: create more housing. If the city you live
in only allows luxury housing to be built — which is often the case, due to
the enormous cost of regulatory compliance, anything cheaper would not be
profitable to build — then it’s luxury housing or none at all.

In earlier eras with less regulation it was still true that more luxury
housing was built. The difference was that when population growth happened, so
much housing would go up so quick that the “luxury apartment” from ten years
ago was now middle class, and the fifteen year old building was working class.

TLDR; it’s exhausting to read story after story about how acute the housing
crisis is, with so little investigation into its root causes. Why is it that
our system leaves such an extreme shortage of housing in the first place, and
what can be done to address that? Those are the questions we need to be
asking, and therein lie the problems we have to solve.

~~~
pessimizer
I feel that you've created a boundary where anybody positing any specific
answer to those questions, such as the one in the quote that lost you, you
would dismiss as hopelessly slanted. Everything with an opinion will be
slanted towards that opinion. I feel anything saying that the causes are
murky, and the means of solving them a mystery; that's what you'll read as
_unbiased_.

~~~
burlesona
Thats a fair criticism.

What I struggle with is, this issue _is_ complex and multi-faceted. I think
it’s therefore easy for people to come in with strong preconceptions and
cherry pick evidence to support simple answers that fit their worldview.

What I wish is that it was easier to have a more nuanced discussion that
didn’t involve demonizing, vilification, or picking sides.

But perhaps that’s naïve.

------
aazaa
> Once upon a time, mass homelessness did not exist in the United States. The
> population of people without stable living situations periodically surged,
> but these waves were temporary, subsiding as the economy improved. The
> phenomenon we now know as homelessness—pervasive, unremarkable, seemingly
> intractable—arose only in the 1980s. ...

The author goes on to cite declines in federal low-income housing funding as
the root cause. What does the full graph of this funding look like going back
to the 1800s?

I suspect that federal low-income housing was a product of the (unsustainable)
Great Society initiative of the LBJ administration. It ramped up to a peak in
the 1980s, then fell.

Could it be that the true cause of the homeless problem every city in the
country faces lies elsewhere than reduced federal funding?

~~~
EdwardDiego
> I suspect that federal low-income housing was a product of the
> (unsustainable) Great Society initiative of the LBJ administration.

Why was it unsustainable? Other countries sustain far higher social spend. Do
you perhaps mean politically unsustainable? Especially given the stronger lean
to the right that the Republicans have manifested last decade.

~~~
aazaa
Funding a massive war effort (Vietnam) while spending freely on welfare
programs (Guns and Butter) wasn't sustainable. A few short years later, the
country was taken off the gold standard due to its recklessness. The effects
of that action reverberate today in the trade war and blooming currency war.

During the 1970s, the US experienced a surge of inflation that wreaked havoc
with the economy.

Many countries you allude to are in dire shape - especially Europe. They pay
next to nothing (compared to US) in defense and a few have been richly endowed
with oil reserves. Their economies have been teetering on recession for years
and now are in the unenviable position of facing negative interest rates
heading into recession.

------
eof
_Strikingly, this crisis of housing insecurity is erupting in America’s
richest, most rapidly developing cities. New York,... Washington, D.C., ...
Seattle is close behind. In Los Angeles and Charlotte, San Jose and Nashville,
the trends are similar. Unemployment is at a generational low; corporate
profits have surged; ... Yet the teachers, maintenance workers, supermarket
cashiers, and medical assistants who help sustain these cities are getting
relentlessly priced out of them._

I am not sure if this is naivety or if the author is being disingenuous to
make a point, but the housing crisis in these big cities is almost entirely an
addiction problem, where it's not an addiction problem, it's almost always a
mental health problem.

Not to minimize the plight of Cokethia, as the economy is clearly broken (and
getting rapidly worse) for those who can't demand premium wages.

edit: s/and have a lot of dependents//

~~~
EdwardDiego
> the housing crisis in these big cities is almost entirely an addiction
> problem

So, there's a lack of affordable housing because... ...people take drugs?|

Can you expand on that? I feel like I've missed something in your post that
explains the logical leap there.

~~~
eof
No. There is a lack of affordable housing because the economy doesn’t have a
way to cope with widening gaps of productivity (not to mention systemic and
historical racism).

However, the vast majority (writing from a phone on train so I’ll have to
challenge you to prove me wrong rather than cite, but the statistics are clear
on this) of homeless people are deep in the throes of addiction or, mentally
unstable.

The working family that can’t make ends meet absolutely exists, I am not in
anyway challenging that.

But, go to one of these tent cities yourself , where these exploding homeless
populations exist, and it will be apparent that people are so addicted that
there is not rent that would be “affordable” as their basic human needs aren’t
even being met for them to be functioning in a positive economic way.

Essentially these people are sick, in a genuinely diagnosable way, and that
sickness manifests in self harm. IMO, it’s pretty clear that this mass
sickness (primarily the opiate crisis) is the leading cause of these exploding
homeless populations.

~~~
9wzYQbTYsAIc
So your argument is that people become homeless because either they take too
much medicine or too little medicine?

~~~
eof
If you define taking pain pills to get high as “taking too much medicine” and
then making bad decisions while withdrawing is “too little medicine”, then yes
that is a very significant minority of people ending up homeless.

But it doesn’t account for people addicted to meth, or alcohol, or people
suffering from schizophrenia, etc.

~~~
9wzYQbTYsAIc
So, taking what I stated (with the clarification of “too little”) as your
argument, what exactly are you proposing as avenues towards home-havingness?

~~~
eof
I have not gone so far to make a proposal, which would depend on the
hypothetical resources available to execute a plan.

I am just providing context for how to think about the problem in a way that
(much) more closely maps to reality than low-earners getting displaced due to
gentrification and wage stagnation.

~~~
9wzYQbTYsAIc
I take issue with the fact that your map of reality is precisely what causes
people to slip through the cracks into homelessness. Thinking about the issue
as a sickness is actually just an avoidance of the problem. You are trying to
reduce and abstract it away to the domain of medicine rather than to address
it head on as a complex system of systems.

