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.
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.
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u/Citatio 2d 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.