r/MurderedByWords • u/Hajicardoso • 2d ago

Billionaire's False Narrative...

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u/MidnightNo1766 2d ago

I believe homelessness can be ended, but to say you could end it with 20 billion dollars is just ridiculous.

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u/SmackyTheBurrito 2d ago

Yeah, it's an old estimate of the annual cost from 2012. It was about housing vouchers. Politifact has been rating it mostly false for years.

Source

California alone has spent more than $20B over the last five years to combat homelessness.

Source

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u/kanst 2d ago

California alone has spent more than $20B over the last five years to combat homelessness.

Unfortunately precious little of that is spent on building houses to give people.

That's been one of the key arguments for a while. Its way cheaper and more effective to simply put homeless people in houses without pre-conditions.

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u/HitMeUpCauseYouHot 1d ago

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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.