You know how in the early and mid 20th century people were predicting all this cool stuff about how the world will be post-scarcity some day soon, nobody will have to work more than a few hours a week, etc?
There is a reason why the "people in power" (hand-waving over who they might actually be) never want that to come to pass.
That's a conspiracy I can't get behind, considering how desperately we cling on to the one taste of a post-scarcity society, having cheap power (pun intended) from oil.
The reason some people are willing to do some jobs involves force. The idea that people have freedom of choice in what they do is a sleight of hand to obscure the fact that many jobs are taken due to threat of immediate homelessness.
There are people on the street not willing to make that choice. Most people on the street chose homelessness in some sense and to some degree.
Someone on r/homeless once said "I didn't choose the choice." In other words, homelessness is often a case of choosing the lesser evil.
They decided it was better than staying in an abusive relationship or something like that.
I wish we would design and build a world with better options and fewer people being pushed into homelessness. But I also wish people would see homeless people more clearly as real people with minds and personalities and some degree of agency.
It is a disservice to them to simply stamp "victim" on their forehead and think no further on the matter.
The forefront of our society's choices that creates this state are zoning laws. They create artificial barriers that increase the minimum viable income level. Around here that minimum is about $1000 for a one bedroom. That's a pretty tall minimum, especially when someone is down and out. Anyone who doesn't make the financial cut for any reason and has no willing support network is on the street.
I'm not talking about more high density housing, though making that less limited would help.
With existing resources it wouldn't be hard to turn parking lots from rundown commercial districts into live-in-your-car lots. I ran a bunch of numbers, and it would be reasonable for a person to rent their parking space and additional shared facilities (wifi, bathrooms, showers, food prep area, laundromat) for less than $150/mo. You might hit as low as $50-$100 depending on local real estate pricing as a non-profit. Most of these ingredients are readily available in every modern city and having a very low rent outlet that allowed people independence would clean up a lot of homelessness. I know I'd much rather live out of a car than on the street.
This is just one potential solution. The impediments are more institutional inertia than an actual inability to solve the problems.
It's a lot more complicated than that and I'm really not interested in hearing more schemes to provide "homes for the homeless." All such schemes boil down "I have some idea for housing people that sounds like it might interest people currently sleeping in a dumpster."
The thing about homelessness is that the minute you have a home, you are no longer homeless.
This is not a separate population that needs some weird sub par answer that damn few people would genuinely desire as a housing solution. Homeless people are just people currently without housing. That's it. That's all it is.
We need more housing for ordinary, not wealthy people. Housing with dignity but that dignity needs to stop being defined by people who think "If it's not a mansion, I ain't living in it!"
We used to build small homes. Normal, market rate small homes.
We mostly don't anymore.
Financing mechanisms and tax incentives are part of the morass of housing policies creating the current mess, not just zoning codes. Though we have largely zoned out of existence the ability to build Missing Middle Housing, etc.
How do small homes improve the affordability gap when a one bedroom apartment is too much?
Financing mechanisms and tax incentives, neither of these prevent creative solutions to problems. Zoning laws do. They dictate all aspects of land use.
Missing Middle Housing is essential for creating mixed use, walkable neighborhoods. We need to resume building neighborhoods of that sort so cars are genuinely optional.
Housing is the single biggest budget item for most people followed by transportation because car ownership is nigh unavoidable for most Americans. Even if rent doesn't actually drop, if you can live without a car and still get to work, suddenly some things make sense.
We no longer build functioning small towns and neighborhoods. We expect everyone to drive everywhere.
Financing is part of the problem because the easiest thing to finance is single family detached housing thanks to precedents set shortly after WW2 which have strongly shaped housing expectations and policies for decades.
Tax incentives, like breaks on interest, tend to encourage "housing inflation" where those who can afford a house at all buy a bigger house because it's no more expensive than a smaller house. It doesn't benefit most people looking for cheap housing. It just encourages Americans to build larger homes.
Zoning laws are absolutely part of the problem. I completely agree with that point.
But New Urbanism has tried to get around that and one of their major sticking points is difficulty in financing projects.
I've spent time researching (space) toilets. In a post-scarcity world, I might spend time to improve their design, or those of the robots that'd maintain them.
Ideally a robot, tbqh. Anything that doesn't require actual human thought, we should push off to machines.
But lacking that—we could also offer people the option to clean toilets in exchange for larger homes or more lavish hobbies. But unlike today, they'd also have the ability to quit their jobs and lead a simpler life, without starving.
There is always a price at which people (myself included) will happily clean toilets. The problem is right now the "choice" for the people doing it is – do the job or your family goes hungry. Have you ever noticed it's always the refugees or undocumented immigrants doing it?
>Do you consider C-suite executives exploited indentured servants?
No, but I fail to see how this answers the question. If I'm asking you what the difference between a kid and an adult is, and you reply with "do you consider 80-year olds a kid", it doesn't tell me anything about what's a kid or not.
Then a given society has not progressed to a point where a new economic paradigm is ready to replace mixed market economies. Even Karl Marx believed capitalism would remain dominant until automation had removed unskilled labor from the equation.
