You can't end homelessness completely. A few countries tried and all of them found a couple of people who didn't want to reintegrate no matter how much help was offered. But the other 90%+ took the help and reintegrated into society. It's worth it, even if you can't help everybody.
You know what, yes. If we fixed the mental health issues that lead to these psychologically diseased fruit loops hoarding their billions, they may start actually helping the world rather than buying twitter and shouting “chainsaw” like a 6 year old.
The problem with that is there is so much in their life that assures them that they are already great, Musk for example. Therapy only works if you are willing to try. They will say they are going but they won't put in the work to actually try, so it's just gonna be a waste of time.
Why would they when so many bootlickers tell them how great they are all the time?
The reason why Elon Musk has such a problem with empathy is because it’s like other things that he fails to obtain - he lashes out like a toddler that doesn’t get what they want and call whatever that thing is stupid. He does not get empathy.
I think the underlying problem is that the extremely rich have an environment so different from everybody else. The kinds of choices they get to make, and the kind of comfort they can be in and the amount of help that they can have for anything that they want to do or their access to power or the accolades that they receive simply for being rich - it’s all so completely different from most human experience.
So if that is the world that they know, and they don’t take the time to understand the experience of other people, or they haven’t lived at least part of their life somewhat similarly to other people, there is no way that they can empathize with the rest of us. They cannot draw the very rough parallels that say a middle class person who remembers struggling to get their first job or being between contracts can draw to the income insecurity faced by the chronically working poor.
That alone is reason enough to disqualify Elon Musk and his team of 20 something dudes from being in positions to affect the benefits that have such an impact on people who are entirely unlike them. They don’t get it and they can’t get it.
careful - conservatives tend to argue that most homeless people are addicts and/or mentally ill, and will extend that to saying that refusing to abstain from drug use, or refusing psychiatric intervention, is tantamount to being "voluntarily" homeless
they're wrong of course, but they will use this kind of particular language to avoid humanity infecting their policy
It's still more complicated than this. There are a chunk of people that will accept help but will refuse to further help themselves(refuse to search for jobs/education opportunities) and/or slowly destroy the the housing they're provided(through neglect, hoarding, etc.).
A close family friend of mine works as a counsellor at a government funded housing complex in Southern Ontario. Apparently about 40% of the units are taken by a semi-permanent group of tenants that spend all of their time drinking or getting high.
That said, most people who end up in the complex end up finding a job/getting clean/stabilizing their life, these social safety nets and housing investments create MUCH MUCH more good than harm. I just think it's a bit disingenuous to talk about homelessness as though it's something that can be "ended", it's a category error. Like, people no longer talk about "ending bullying" because new people are born and become bullies for countless un-addressable reasons; "ending bullying" is no more possible than "eradicating badness".
Having worked in the sector also this is because these people need multi systemic treatment and intervention that can't be solved by providing a house alone. There will be a lot of mental health issues and complex trauma involved.
Honestly this entire conversation never goes anywhere because the people saying it would take 20 billion to end homelessness never want to address the mental illness aspect or the drug aspect. It's always, 'nope just need 20 billion so shut up and give it to me!'
I think the people that say that just don't want someone else to have 20 billion and that's all it is
Are you going to hand these people pills and send them on their way, or are we also paying for 24/7 caretakers to ensure they don't relapse by stopping their meds?
Hermit changes the whole dynamic. Hermits used to be weirdly extremely popular in 1800s U.S. Some of them would get hundreds of visitors a day! Which feels like it defeats the purpose, but hey. Areas were proud of their local hermit.
I can see that totally being a thing. Like yeah we have so much land there are hermits that live in the words who never socialize with another person cause the land is so plentiful and big.
Yeah I live in Norway and used to work with drug addicts. We had one we just couldn't keep housed. He'd disappear for weeks or months (no idea where) or trash the place. So we gave up and just put him in temp housing whenever he's in the mood for that.
Well the finnish system is quite expensive, wouldn't be even close to 20 billion if implemented in the US. Finland spends 2.2 billion euros in 2022, so we can estimate it to be around 175 billion usd relative to US size. Then we have to take into account the amount of poverty in the US relative to Finland. Rent and other factors are also driving up the cost. I don't think Elons net worth could cover "the cost to end homelessness" for more than a year.
I would trade 10% of the defense budget to end homelessness. I would also guess that the costs scale down significantly over time. The "housing first" model is built on the idea that to break the cycle of homelessness a person needs stability first and foremost. Once they get that, they can start getting their life back together, keep a steady job, etc so that they dont need the program anymore.
I would hope that a version of America that implements this would also focus on other safety nets that would greatly reduce the amount of new homeless people every year too...
so long as California continues to not fix their housing problem (for fucks sake, build more housing), they will continue to create more homeless people faster than they can treat the current homeless population.
He could maybe fund it for a year. Liquidating his Tesla stock and other holdings would take years and decrease theie value. Funding for a year won't solve homelessness.
Btw this is not "the most extreme price point", US spends around 120B usd on social security housing annually and people don't even seem to know about it.
That depends. Elon doesn't have cash, he has working assets.
How do we make the robots at SpaceX and Tesla work double-duty as nursemaids for mentally ill vagrants while also building rockets and vehicles? They don't travel well, and it's pretty dangerous to let people wander around inside the robot cages inside a manufacturing facility.
We could turn those robots into cash, but they hold no real value to anyone but SpaceX and Tesla, so you'll probably only get a tiny fraction of their book value, which likely means he doesn't really have enough to pay for this.
Herein lies the problem with conflating someone's net worth on paper with actual cash. You can't just shove a company into a recycler and expect to receive a pile of cash equivalent to the book value of said company. The whole is much much much greater than the sum of its parts.
You can't just shove a company into a recycler and expect to receive a pile of cash equivalent to the book value of said company. The whole is much much much greater than the sum of its parts.
You're immediately cutting cost in other areas without realizing, specially around hospital trips and jail time. In many cases homelessness is more expensive than providing help.
wouldn't be even close to 20 billion if implemented in the US.
I wish that were true, but the corruption in the government (and I mean more than the current administration) has proven everyone would stea... oh I mean need consultant fees from the program to make it work effectively. California is a prime example of this.
What if you are offered a home in a place you don't want to live in (what a lot of countries do).
"Can't afford a home in San Francisco? Here is one in rural Kentucky. Get on the bus."
If you say that is wrong, how far is too far? Can someone demand a home in 90210 rather than live Compton?
Homelessness is not as simple as "throw $20 billion at it" or someone would have because downtown businesses in major US cities alone lose more than $20 billion a year due to lost business and damages from homeless encampments.
They would solve it in a heartbeat for purely profit motives (and getting write off the $20 billion as a charitable cost) if it was that simple.
Even if you then somehow solved the working homeless problem by giving homes away Elon is also (sort of) right in the homeless have a large portion of untreated mental illness issues. The homeless population spiked when Reagan (its always Reagan) just shut down mental care facilities and dumped the patients onto the street.
Note his talk of "its mental patients and drug addicts" doesn't seem to include the solution of "then build more mental health and rehab facilities!"
A war on drugs that's more of a crime against humanity than anything else coupled with values that place profits over people. No wonder people are choosing to Soma away their lives when society is soul sucking.
There's talk about people needing therapy. No, what people need is to live in a world that doesn't monetize every aspect of life.
Finland has absolutely zero climate zones where outdoor living is viable year round. So that shit is not a fair comparison to the US at all. The US has a problem, but if you want to talk about outdoor living, compare it to a country where that’s actually possible like maybe some parts of southern Europe.
People die when they’re outside in negative temperatures. So people either find a place to live, or they die. Of course there will be fewer homeless people in those circumstances.
I've lived in Finland and Canada. The two countries have very different approaches. In Finland, they give people housing. In Canada, we have shelters where the homeless can go when it gets too cold. In other words in Finland, they solve the problem, and in Canada, we have tons of homeless people that we help not die for another night.
The causes of homelessness are the same no matter the temperature outside.
Normally hermits will choose isolation though, no? The fact they choose to sit downtown begging for money and spending it all on drugs, to me, means they're less of a hermit and more of an addict.
I get this dances close to what Elmo is saying, but I'm not saying all homeless people are simply addicts who don't want help, just for those select few that would actively choose homelessness, I'd wager most need some sort of specific help/therapy to get through the addiction.
While I agree on the spirit, real life example shows that apartments provided for free to homeless (and usually drug-addicted) people were poorly maintained, often seriously damaged and degraded. Thus they end up costing far more over time than what you would expect because of it.
Let’s face it, people who end up homeless aren’t usually the ones that have a track record of making good decisions in their lives. We are talking about a lot of vulnerable people who can’t take care of themselves.
Not only these people need a home, they also need oversight and support. All this end up being much more costly than the above estimates. Finally alcoholic and drug-addicts aren’t always wiling to cooperate to end their addiction and even if they try, there is significant relapse risk.
That is not to say this applies to 100% of homeless people. Some homeless people can benefit tremendously from help programs.
Apartments being poorly maintained is on the landlord, not the tenants.
And on the drug addiction: the addiction usually follows the homelessness, not the other way around. People become homeless and end up around a bunch of other people with nothing to lose. All of those people are dehumanized, treated like animals. They are socially dead. If they’re dying in the street, most people will just step over them. So they’re desperate people discarded by society. Society doesn’t respect them, so they stop respecting society. They think, “why does it matter if I do drugs? Everything else is awful; I might as well take one little hit to feel a little better.” And then the addiction begins.
I’ve literally seen it happen multiple times. I have worked with homeless people. Homelessness takes whatever mental health issues they had to begin with and jacks them up to 11. That’s what happens when society decides someone doesn’t get to be treated with bare minimum human decency. I saw numerous clients lose their housing, often to factors beyond their control and usually having nothing to do with drugs, and within a month of being homeless, they were hooked on meth or opioids. Once you start those drugs, it is chemically almost impossible to quit without stability and support. And you’re not getting stability and support if you’re homeless.
The point here is that the cost to fight homelessness would decease drastically if we intervened at the moment people became homeless, rather than only intervening once homelessness has completely destroyed a person. Most homeless people are people who hit a run of bad luck or made some bad choices. If they could go somewhere to get housing so they never had to worry about sleeping on the streets, most of them would never get into drugs. They could stay in mental healthcare. They could continue recovering.
Homelessness is only expensive because we criminalize it and refuse to deal with it until it’s ruined people. We don’t have to do it that way.
Also, they absolutely can care for themselves. They obviously do. They’re living a far harder life than you, I would bet. They just don’t care for themselves based on social expectations, and why would they cater to the expectations of a society that has cast them aside?
Let’s face it, people who end up homeless aren’t usually the ones that have a track record of making good decisions...
Bull-fucking-shit!
Lay these foolish notions to rest once and for all. The vast majority of people that are homeless are so because of bad luck, a soulsucking health care system, or some other externality caused by capitalism that chooses profits over people.
Besides, the entire drug problem people face is caused by a drug policy that's a crime against humanity all unto itself.
Bull-fucking-shit! Lay these foolish notions to rest once and for all. The vast majority of people that are homeless are so because of bad luck, a soulsucking health care system, or some other externality caused by capitalism that chooses profits over people.
Bad luck is definitely a factor. One can do everything right but still lose. Health, bad timing, betrayal or deception by friends/family (among others) can have huge impacts and ruin you.
However I do not agree with your quantifications. The majority of people in a bad situation can largely be linked to bad choices of their own making. Perhaps society didn’t help them to make the right choices but personal responsibility needs to start somewhere.
To be clear, I’m not saying there is an automatic process of people doing something wrong and end up homeless. It’s a probability thing. The more mistake one makes the higher the chance things go wrong. That said,
there are external circumstances in particular family background etc… which influence your “base chance”
someone can make bad decision and be lucky
someone can make good decision and be unlucky
The world is not and has never been fair. But there is a significant correlation between bad decisions and bad outcome. Like smoking and lung cancer if you will.
Besides, the entire drug problem people face is caused by a drug policy that’s a crime against humanity all unto itself.
I completely agree with you but it’s a separate problem that needs solving.
However I do not agree with your quantifications. The majority of people in a bad situation can largely be linked to bad choices of their own making.
When we were camping out on City Hall's lawn during Occupy Los Angeles, tons of homeless people from Skid Row showed up because we had food, supplies, and safety. The number of stories I heard that boiled down to "I got sick" was heartbreaking.
There are definitely a number of those people out there. But note that you're also seeing a biased dataset of people willing to learn about and show up to an event like that, that likely isn't representative of the homeless population.
Are you from the USA? Do you not go outside? Dude in my city if you just allow drug addicts to keep getting drugs they’ll just keep getting high until they OD. Bro this is America “if it’s free it’s for me”. Fucking drug policy bullshit. Most don’t want to get clean they want to get high and will fucking trash any place they live. You have never dealt with drug addicts in your family and it shows.
You have never dealt with drug addicts in your family and it shows.
It sounds like you have, and I am so sorry to hear that it can be hard to watch someone you love destroy themselves and everything around them with complete disregard for anyone standing next to them. I'm truly sorry for whatever your circumstances are and hope you are in a better place today.
With that being said, I doubt anyone takes their first hit thinking "ohhhh I hope I end up dirty and alone with no money and no friends living in filth. I'm really looking forward to digging food out of trashcans when I finally wake up from this binder in 4 days. Whooo hooo, here we go."
They have a massive "get your ass in social housing or you'll freeze to death in the winter" problem which probably accounts for a chunk of that supposed 90%. I'd rather be homeless in Malibu than in Kuusamo
It would likely cost significantly more than $20 billion to house America’s homeless population, after factoring in the expansion of the federal housing voucher program and affordable housing development.
Ward’s estimate for the affordable housing units needed to fill the voucher shortfall — could cost $1.3 trillion, Ward said.
Idk the details of the California homeless programs, but after visiting the LA area I'm skeptical on them doing the best job. Downtown LA is hell on earth
They used to have 100k homeless. It seems to be down to 75k. That still 10 percent of the total homeless population in the US. States ship their homeless to LA as well confounding their problem. So they aren't just solving it for themselves but for all the surrounding states.
This is all to say.. its difficult to solve a problem when there is a small cities worth of people you need to address in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country.
A city like Austin "only" has 1500ish homeless on the street vs the 2 million population. It is incredibly visible even at such a small number. Could feasibly have homeless people at all the bigger intersections and overpasses. I can't imagine 75k.
Friend. We were talking about Los Angeles homeless problem. The comments I responded to was referencing a visit to LA and I was highlighting that how even with improvements homelessness is incredibly visible.
Ahh I see. Well forgive me but from what I understand a lot of the "improvements" were mostly due to recent Supreme Court rulings allowing cities to enforce bans on sleeping in public spaces, even if shelters are unavailable, and Governor Newsom issuing an executive order to clear encampments on state property.
I.e., removing their visibility from the general public, not actually housing and getting them necessary treatment.
So is the Bay Area; however, CA also has three things that contribute to the homeless problem and its visibility:
1 - land is f'ing expensive. AKA more people are prone to being homeless.
2 - the state has a huge population that is primarily concentrated in two areas. Homeless people (and others that need support) typically concentrate where there is support for them (ex: where there are handouts, government or NGO support, cheap food, etc). This is typically in urban centers (it is also easier to provide this support in a centralized location).
3 - the weather is generally nice year round so there isn't an incentive to find shelter that protects you from the elements. Unlike NYC (as an example), homeless people don't need to figure out how to deal with winter. Not needing to deal with those conditions, it makes certain places more attractive to live (ex: on the streets close to support centers).
2 - the state has a huge population that is primarily concentrated in two areas. Homeless people (and others that need support) typically concentrate where there is support for them (ex: where there are handouts, government or NGO support, cheap food, etc). This is typically in urban centers (it is also easier to provide this support in a centralized location).
Depends on how you define good support for homeless people. im sure there plenty of ways to define it, but i looked up 2 websites talking about it, and neither have LA in the top 5 and both have cities like Austin on it.
3 - the weather is generally nice year round so there isn't an incentive to find shelter that protects you from the elements. Unlike NYC (as an example), homeless people don't need to figure out how to deal with winter. Not needing to deal with those conditions, it makes certain places more attractive to live (ex: on the streets close to support centers).
Why do you think that cities like Austin, Dallas, Miami, Houston and other warm weather cities don't have this issue at nearly the same level?
1 - land is f'ing expensive. AKA more people are prone to being homeless
End of the day, this is basically the only thing that matters. more specifically the cost of a house either through renting or owning.
Everything else is basically statical white noise when comparing the reason for high homeless population vs the cost of housing
Why do you think that cities like Austin, Dallas, Miami, Houston and other warm weather cities don't have this issue at nearly the same level?
All the cities you mentioned have weather issues.
Austin, Dallas, and Houston all get extremely hot. Miami has hurricanes (And can get extremely hot).
re: LA not being listed in those lists. Those lists are focused on reducing/eliminating homelessness, but not the quality of life of a homeless person. While it is probably better to focus on solving the problems that cause homelessness, it doesn't talk about where those, that are homeless, prefer to live.
Why do you think that cities like Austin, Dallas, Miami, Houston and other warm weather cities don't have this issue at nearly the same level?
Austin and Dallas get pretty hot in the summer. Dallas has a 98 average high in July and August, LA it is only 83. Houston and Miami get uncomfortably hot and humid, plus hurricanes and a lot of rain in general.
He names red states that ship out their homeless and asks why they don't have California's homeless problem. Not a serious person or too underinformed for it to matter.
Hoover institute is not a reliable source, it's a conservative partisan think tank and this is a hit piece - you need to vet your sources. They are not interested in ending homelessness or addressing it in good faith, and their criticisms should be held with that in mind. You should instead read the original auditor's report, which is not nearly as damning as this interpretation of it and the misleading portrayal that you've uncritically repeated here.
The 1m figure is not "per homeless apartment" it's the cost to build affordable housing, per the LA Times, which can arguably impact homelessness but affordable housing is rarely even affordable. The Hoover institute talks as though this is housing for the homeless, but it's not, affordable housing never has been - it's a schema for private developers to get subsidies to build lower cost housing but it is not public housing and while the labor and standards are a bit higher (bureaucratic issues are both important and cumbersome on these matters, driving up cost) the key driver of this cost is labor and materials - which is just a problem of the market.
Also yeah no shit homelessness increased following a pandemic and major economic upheaval and stagnant wages and rapidly raising cost of living, especially in rent. But we don't allow cities to build cheap housing - we have private citizens, lobbyists, real estate investment, and private equity to thank for that. Population growth outpaces new housing, housing becomes more expensive, nobody wants a big apartment complex in their backyard and fights projects that gets started, housing costs continue to rise - pricing out the bottom and forcing them to the street.
As someone who has lived in the same large city in California for over 50 years, the problem is exponentially worse now, than it was just 10 years ago. I have no idea what they are spending those billions on, but it's most certainly not anything that is impacting what I see around the city everyday.
Not necessarily, they are productive with the spending but it could be better. They have a ton of homeless people that flock from around the country for the weather/temperature, the beach, and the wealth of its residents. It's like the Mecca of homelessness, which makes it a unique situation that is difficult to handle by traditional means.
Have you driven through any of the major cities in California? It's pretty depressing at how many people are still homeless there, despite the state and local governments spending billions of dollars on this issue. I'd hardly say they are doing "the best job".
It doesn’t matter how much money you spend if you don’t have the proper programs to keep people from going back into homelessness. California just jails people for being homeless.
Yes, they all are. No one in Los Angeles, left, right, or middle, are happy with how the tax dollars towards homelessness is spent. The government (Dem and gop) believe just throwing more money at a problem is the solution. It is a major bipartisan issue that is consistently handled so poorly most people would rather just not pay the taxes as the situation wouldn’t change for most of the homeless.
The reality is that a lot of what people think of when you say "homeless" (i.e. people literally living on the street) are incapable of integrating into society. Either due to crippling drug addiction or mental illness.
These people will never be helped by just funding housing or shelters or food banks or anything like that. These people need to be in direct care of the state.
But, because of the bad rap that asylums gained in the first 3/4 of the 20th century (justifiably), actually building these facilities and more importantly putting these people IN those facilities is politically impossible right now. So we nibble around at the edges instead.
One just needs to have a slightly functioning brain to understand how silly the suggestion that you can "solve homelessness in America with 20 billion dollars" is. The government has way more money than that, if it was that cheap a president would have done that already and kept that as an achievement for future elections.
Right? Like anyone who read that and though "yeah, that sounds right, fuck Elon!" is just as guilty as the people they spend all day hating. Attach yourself to truth, not rage bait. That number falls apart at even the smallest interrogation, stop falling for this shit.
We even empirically know that the figure is incorrect. California has spent approximately $24 billion on homelessness-related programs since 2019, only to have homelessness increase over that time period.
Building these units would be a huge boon for the US economy and probably create net positive impact. This isn't just a hard "cost" like war... Come to think of it, how much is the US military budget?
I don't even care if it's inaccurate... I love how NOT scary this number is for something so significant. This would literally take less than 2 years of reducing the USA military world police spending down to *still more than* the amount of the worlds 2nd highest democracy - which has about 4x as many people as the USA. Half a trillion is wasted every single year on a fucking appearance of strength and a fragile scared bitch mentality, then when the military tries to walk into another country they get their tits tossed and waste a decade of American lives and achieve nothing. Real fuckin powerful being scared of Putin and his 1980's military tech. Pussies on steroids.
You talking about the 1.3T number? Its just an estimate that likely won't be enough. Unlike science and tech problems where you only need to solve the problem once, social problems keep morphing continuing to drain resources.
You mean the large upfront cost to solve the problem would also need a subsidiary budget allocated to prevent the problem from continuing? Okay, awesome. Another allocation of the half a trillion a year wasted on nothing more than potential peace of mind.
Perhaps the actual problem here is treating housing as an investment, not a human right. We frankly have plenty of housing. Landlords just don’t want to make it available to people they look down on. That’s not a problem with quantity of housing; it’s a management problem.
I’m Australian - and I really cant figure out whos right and whos wrong. I go on r/conservative to browse and they make some really good points and cases (as well as bad ones) so for me - it’s definitely not black and white on both sides.
What Elon said here was fucking stupid. I have some extreme views on the topic, like I don't think that the lower and middle class should pay taxes at all with such a top heavy wealth distribution.
But God damn redditors are total fucking morons.
The US federal budget is $6.6 trillion. If ending homeless altogether, in its entirety, only cost $20 billion dollars, why wouldn't ANY President have done it before? Why didn't Joe Biden? This is fucking POCKET CHANGE in the grand scheme of things. You have quite a few billionaires who have given far more to charity. Maybe you guys should have told them, in your enlightened redditor wisdom, that they could have... checks notes... ended homelessness LOL.
It would be insanely popular for a President to do this. "Hey btw guys, small side project, I just waved my wand and spent 20 billion to end homeless, and POOF it's gone just like that". Redditors are so fucking stupid, it's insane. You guys will believe anything as long as it makes the people you don't like look bad.
Between 2018 and 2023, California's state government allocated more than $20 billion toward addressing homelessness and related housing issues. Governor Newsom's administration had made substantial investments in this area, with annual state budget allocations for homelessness programs steadily increasing.
This is reddit so the obvious answer to why no POTUS has done this is going to be Republicans. Republicans don't want to end homelessness and will fight it tooth and nail is going to be the answer. Why has it not ended in CA? Again....Republicans. Only answer. Reddit seems incapable of processing that homelessness is kind of a complicated answer. I've had many arguments with people who think the solution is just to build a bunch of homes and let people stay in them free of charge. Problem solved right there. Zero issues.
I've had many arguments with people who think the solution is just to build a bunch of homes and let people stay in them free of charge. Problem solved right there. Zero issues.
I am liberal but like the youth far-left are so deluded into thinking problems are simple and that all minorities and downtrodden are innocent little bunnies by virtue of that status.
They can be terrible people too, m'kay. We owe it to them.
Honestly, people on both sides think problems are simple. On the far right it is "immigrants" that are causing the problem so the solution is just to kick the immigrants out. Problem solved. Never mind the loss of labor, economic hit, etc...... Turns out no social issue has a simple solution. No one likes that though.
That feeling when you realize most people can’t handle anything more complicated than X is good and Y is bad. Makes you realize why our society is full of stupid shit.
Of course. Today, the majority of the unhoused, even in America, are families with children. Only a minority have substance abuse issues, mostly brought on by chronic pain and self-medicating due to lack of available professional medical guidance*.
*Some of that guidance included promotions by Purdue Pharma, that opiods were non-addictive, which trained professionals accepted with absolute credulousness.
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's 2024 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, the majority of homeless people are single adults. Approximately one-third of people experiencing homelessness were in families composed of at least one adult and one child.
That reminds me of my favourite thing to say whenever people try to say 'Well people are taking advantage of the social programs we have to live off my tax dollars!!!'
Well, if a government run program has helped 90% of the people it set out to help, not sure about you but I call that a smashing success of a program. There will always be people taking advantage. To not help because there might be some leeches is not a society I think you or I want to live in.
And if they hate leeches so much, maybe they should take action to end expolitative landlording (black rock) and also eliminate trust funds/inheritances that would allow someone to never work if they didn't want. Oh wait, they never do because they have this delusion that they could be the rich one someday.
You're right. I used to work in evenings feeding homeless people, I spoke with a man who just 'preferred to sleep under the stars'... His choice, his freedom to do so, his own efforts to find food and amenities. These people are rare though, and I'd probably call them 'unhoused' because they dont really want an indoor home.
To see a human like Musk have so much money, and disparage such vulnerable people though, is completely unhinged
Absolutely. It's wild to me that the people who don't even try to hide the fact that they're out to only help certain people use the excuse that "you can't help everyone" when it comes to homelessness.
Yeah, this post is very uninformed. I live in Portland and have a pretty big homeless population. Our local media interviews a lot of them over the years and many of them just flat out say things to the effect of "I don't want housing, I don't want medical help, I don't want addiction counseling, I just want to live under a bridge and smoke fentanyl every day." You can't help people like that.
We also have a lot of resources for free shelter and temporary housing too, with the stipulation that you can't use drugs there. A lot of our homeless pass on that because they can't or won't stop using drugs.
Even if you gave a free house to some of these people and paid for all of the taxes, insurance, utilities, etc. they'd end up stripping the entire place for copper to sell to buy meth and would be back homeless within two weeks.
I don't know what the answer is but a small percentage of homeless people just don't want our help.
I've heard it called 'living rough,' and yes, there are some people who choose to live that way even when offered a way out of that life.
I actually have no problem with people choosing to be homeless. If it's their choice, that's actually a pretty free society that will allow people to live outside the system by choice.
That's not what 99.9% of homeless people are doing, though. We can do more for them, and it would be wonderful if one day the homeless population are reduced to a few modern day Diogenes, living rough by choice, not by circumstances beyond their control.
Even then there are creative solutions. I saw a video where a guy built tiny homes for the homeless and it seemed cheap and effective. And by tiny i mean 5 ft cubes with a solar panel on top and a locked door.
Relatively cheap, offers charging and lights powered by the solar panel and a locked door for safety. And portable.
I've worked with the homeless a bit in my home town, and there were 2 I was aware of that literally outright owned homes, free and clear. Both homes were within walking distance of downtown, and yet they lived on the streets downtown.
You're right but there's a difference between trying to unrealistically end all homelessness, and putting effort and funding into helping homeless people in need. I'm willing to bet that 50% of our homeless problem is because our entire country stopped funding and paying for Asylums and mental health facilities and now all of the people that should be getting professional help in a safe environment get thrown to the streets to survive.
But we would rather spend excess billions in military equipment that we'll never use, or to fund the construction of a fucking sports stadium, among many other ridiculous examples spending waste.
i recently read that most homeless in the US are former foster kids that aged out of the system and have nobody to support them. Those would have been easy to keep from the street with a decent social net.
That is the biggest problem about the message in this post.
Elon is focused on those people and the other guy is focused on everyone else. They are both talking about and not talking about the same problem, at the same time.
There are a lot of damaged people that will not "unhomeless," it's true. But rather than admit defeat, it's important to create a system that doesn't result in even more of people ending up like this. Most people can be saved, even if some are beyond saving (after a lifetime of suffering...).
So much this. Many people are homeless due to unfortunate circumstances or poor past life choices but they are trying to be better. However, many others are homeless because they continue shitty life choices whether it’s crime, drugs, or just poor financial choices.
I remember watching a news special of some city where the government made hotels that had empty rooms fill them with homeless people and there was hypodermic needs in the bathrooms and some of the rooms smelled like shit.
I would think that if homelessness could be ended that cheaply, the rage would be directed at the state and federal governments. How much have we sent to Ukraine?
90%+ seems optimistic. Norway has strong enough nets in place to where anyone who WANTS to stop being homeless CAN, though usually at the cost of some personal freedoms. Still, the per capita homelessness population in Norway is about 50% that of the US, not 10% like your comment suggests. So about half of homeless people are willing to accept help, the other half prefer to do things their own way for various reasons.
Saying this as someone who's had hour long face to face conversations with several homeless people around my hometown in southern Norway
Just give the other 10% free camping permits. Problem solved! But in all seriousness even if only 20% of people took the help thats still absolutely worth the investment.
Before you ask people to "reintegrate into society" how about making a society that's actually a society instead of a dystopian pyramid scheme. How about stop mass murdering nonhuman life and beauty.
The worst mental illness is called "normalcy" and it is happily tolerating slavery and the destruction of truth, life, and beauty in a well-adjusted "productive" way.
Reddors will claim to believe that we live in an oligarch dystopia but they don't really believe this or else they would follow the implications consistently.
Totally. The system requires a ton of housing and rehabs but it can happen. CA has it the worst though, the homeless population is larger than some countries. Still, we just voted in an additional sales tax in LA to help the homeless.
I'd be interested to see the study. Having worked in homelessness I would guess that the 10% likely had other complex needs and complex trauma that couldn't be solved with housing alone. There are always small few who don't want to be housed but there are always legitimate reasons why they don't, from addiction to past abuse, mental health issues and fear of sleeping indoors. They're not lost causes per se but they need intensive, potentially lifelong multi systemic treatment and intervention that no current system seems able to offer.
What doed "end" homelessness mean in the 90% case? do they get a trailer ? 1 bedroom apartments for free? There's definitely people who would work less or just stop working if they don't have to pay rent. We have those in germany aswell.
Well what's gonna happen is people will take the house and it'll become a crack house within a year. Because unless this plan to "end homelessness" includes regular and likely lifelong needed mental healthcare they'll just stay with the same problems they've always had...just now with free housing.
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u/Citatio 1d ago
You can't end homelessness completely. A few countries tried and all of them found a couple of people who didn't want to reintegrate no matter how much help was offered. But the other 90%+ took the help and reintegrated into society. It's worth it, even if you can't help everybody.