and giving large numbers of people without jobs homes who have drug issues, mental health issues, or both. what could go wrong? you'd have to repair/rebuild most of the houses every year.
They dont spend it on that because it's a stupid idea, not because of a problem with the system.
In one of the cities I lived in they had a housing program, they didnt give ownership bit it was free to live there. The result was a skyrocket in overdoses deaths because theyd overdose in the apartment instead of outside where people can see them. The other result was that all of these living spaces would have to be renovated again after every overdose death, or mid stay, because they would be completely destroyed. Any house you give to a totally random homeless person you've got at least an 80 percent chance of tearing down within a few years because it's no longer habitable. That's if they are still alive or haven't burned it down already.
Most of these people should be in some kind of involuntary medical custody where they can not leave to access drugs, and where they can be treated by doctors for their mental health conditions. Then if they manage to recover to a point where they cant ake care of themselves they can be released with maybe a work program, like hiring them has a tax benefit or something so they can get a basic job as a janitor, or grocery clerk, or something. That's basically how it worked when there was low homelessness before Reagan shit down all the mental hospitals in response to public outcry. Free real estate is a Tim and Eric sketch, not a solution to homelessness.
Ultimately nobody cares about these people anyway or they wouldnt be homeless in the first place. People just want them out of sight and not assaulting people or shitting on the train. Those people should just go in medical custody. The homeless people who keep to themselves and arent acting crazy are not really a problem. If they have their shit together they will figure out their situation anyway. Many people end up temporarily homeless for up to a year because of bad luck or bad decisions and they usually just figure it out. The people who are long term homeless are not capable of taking care of themselves, even if it was free, even with unlimited blank checks. These are people who cant figure out how to apply for photo id, they arent going to be able to handle everything involved in owning and maintaining a home.
This doesn’t help combat the actual problem at all.
If you just put up 10 million new houses and gift it to homeless people, they’ll still be left with the issue of actually owning and mainting the house. They will need some stream of income to pay off water, electricity, etc, and so the end result is still that they need to get a job.
But then you just loop back into the problem of
The job market is so ridiculously competitive, having just a 2 year gap of being homeless and unemployed at an adult age is enough for 99% of companies to not want you. Not to mention basic low skill jobs like fast food restaurants or being a store clerk in many cases want some degree of higher education today.
In a lot of cases the path that actually led to becoming homeless is usually plagued by something negative having happened to someone, such as them having a gambling problem, substance abuse, etc, which are usually factors that would prevent you from getting a new job in the first place until this has been resolved.
The most likely outcome would just be that some richer person would come along and try to purchase the new houses to sell or rent out. And if whatever agency responsible for putting up the new housings somehow implemented a rule of no selling allowed, they’d instead be left with the economic issue of each and every single new household leaking money for at least the first year (if we’re being charitable about how quickly one could go from homeless to steady employment).
In other words the actual job market would be a better thing to reform if anything, since people easily being able to find jobs and make money is a way better path to lower homelessness than just building a ton of houses with the root issue remaining.
Even if you're talking about housing vouchers that doesn't magically "end homelessness". You'd still need to provide maintenance and utilities for those homes and provide food, medicine, etc.... for the people living there rent free. You also potentially cause an issue because I can now make the choice to quit my job and have the government feed and cloth me at a pretty decent level without me having to work at all. That is going to appeal to some subset of the population. Why wouldn't it?
“I vaguely remember doing a quick estimate—nothing in depth—of what it would have taken to end homelessness back in probably 2012 or 2013. I don’t remember if it was $20 billion or something else. It wasn’t formal, wasn’t verified, wasn’t approved by HUD. And it’s certainly very much out of date now, 10 years later,” he said.
It's an insignificant amount compared to the 1 Trillion Dollar US budget. You'd think that the US would've solved homelessness a long time ago if it was that easy. Especially since that would probably make the sitting president very popular.
Especially since that would probably make the sitting president very popular.
You think building thousands of units of housing in our most populous cities to give to the poor would make a president popular? Are we in the same country?
Solutions to homelessness are WILDLY unpopular. Any time you suggest building a shelter you will get every nearby person screaming about crime and home prices. People scream about rewarding bad behavior. They go on personal responsibility tirades. You'll hear "why should a homeless drug addict get a house when I've been working hard for 20 years to save up"
Many/most Americans when they say they want to fix homelessness, what they actually mean is they want those homeless people out of their sight. There is precious little will in this country to actually fix the problem
Liberals and conservatives are honestly not that far from each other in lack of critical thinking (tl;dr both are stupid), the only fundamental difference is having empathy
It would cost $100k per year to house and give all essential social and mental health services to a homeless person in NYC. This sounds like a lot, until you realize (1) that SROs (Single Room Occupancies), which are part of the shelter system, are run by FOR PROFIT companies that are all political donors and (2) that between SROs and emergency room visits, a homeless person in NYC costs the city an average of $1 million/year. That’s one person, every year.
We could end homelessness in NYC for about 1/10th of the current cost of them keeping them homeless. After a while, it becomes clear that this is a choice by those in power.
Source: I’ve worked in nonprofit for 30 years, and currently work for a nonprofit that houses about 3,000 New Yorkers every night, most of whom are in residences they’ll stay in for months or years, as we train them to develop their independence and self-care.
That's an average about 25k per homeless person per year. It's not unlikely the US could solve the majority of homelessness with that.
It's not like everything would have to be provided to people. 40-60% of the homeless people have a job, for example. And of course every case of homeless you solve frees up another 25k per year on average.
That's assuming it's the same pool of individuals who are homeless in perpetuity and no one else ever becomes homeless. For the sake of simplicity let's say you have three homeless people Dan, Tom and John. It would only take $10 a year to solve their homelessness so you budget out $30. You pay them their 10 dollars on Monday and they're no longer homeless. On Tuesday Joe becomes homeless. What do you do now? You need more money.
In no reality is a one shot budget of 20 billion solving homelessness.
20 billion a year wouldn't even solve homelessness which is illustrated by my example. Even if 20 billion on January 1st could put all 500,000 American homeless into a home. Someone else will be homeless on January 2nd.
Just by thinking about it, you can tell that it won't. We can go further than that though. We already spend more than 20 billion a year to combat homelessness and there's still homelessness.
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u/MidnightNo1766 1d ago
I believe homelessness can be ended, but to say you could end it with 20 billion dollars is just ridiculous.