301–310 of 660 posts
The US chooses not to end homelessness. We have the highest GDP in the world. We could end it if we wanted to. I was in Japan recently. A choice was made there as well.
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The housing situation in Canada is insane and is so obviously due to not building enough housing and bringing too many people into the country via immigration. The fact that it costs 1200$/month for a room in a rural area is incredibly damning. I went to college in Ottawa, and now I live in Austin Texas. It's similar in size, although Austin has been growing more lately. Curiously, they are also both capitols, colleg…
>and bringing too many people into the country via immigration. In a functioning economy, more immigration will just result in more housing being built , as long as the immigrants are working. Especially since the cost of housing construction is largely the cost of labor. Immigration is a distraction from the core inability to build more housing.
Canada has PLENTY of free space for construction, and modern construction is pretty cheap and efficient. But economic forces are concentrating the growth in a few areas. Well-intentioned efforts to force "affordable housing" and "walkable neighborhoods" make these forces even worse.
The root cause fix is to stop the economic forces that pack people into ever smaller areas.
This issue is very relevant for me since I have been homeless since May. It's been a bad run of being a target of criminal activity, unemployment and just running out of money during my job search. I cope with a mix of volunteering, overpriced housing (think $1200/month for a room in a rural area before I ran out of money for that), catsitting, house-sitting, staying with family and sleeping in my ancient car. Althou…
The housing situation in Canada is insane and is so obviously due to not building enough housing and bringing too many people into the country via immigration. The fact that it costs 1200$/month for a room in a rural area is incredibly damning. I went to college in Ottawa, and now I live in Austin Texas. It's similar in size, although Austin has been growing more lately. Curiously, they are also both capitols, colleg…
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>and bringing too many people into the country via immigration. In a functioning economy, more immigration will just result in more housing being built , as long as the immigrants are working. Especially since the cost of housing construction is largely the cost of labor. Immigration is a distraction from the core inability to build more housing.
The continual drive for growth is a problem though. By definition it isn’t sustainable, yet we keep adding, consuming, growing.
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In some US popular culture “drug addict” is code for “weak or immoral person.” There’s very little empathy or understanding of people who are much less fortunate; there’s plenty of evidence in this thread. This misguided moral compass outweighs even sensible practices like harm reduction. People would rather see junkies die on the street of hepatitis than give them free housing and needles. It satisfies some primal n…
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How do you end homelessness, when some percent of homeless people will, if you give them a place to stay, smoke meth all day and make their apartment and nearby apartments health hazards? Many drug addicts don't want to be addicted, and would try to go through treatment if provided. But some are inveterate, and don't want to quit. What do you do with them?
“[…] if you give them a place to stay, smoke meth all day and make their apartment and nearby apartments health hazards” You skipped a step or two in there, but I will note that if you had real health care, the homeless adhd and such would be on their vyvanse prescriptions rather than self-medicating with meth.
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> bringing too many people into the country via immigration The housing situation has clearly severely declined post pandemic at the same time that immigration was restarted and increased, but I gotta point out that Vancouver has had a severe homeless crisis my entire life, long, long before this recent government changed immigration rates or even came to power. As far back as 2007 I was reading articles about how Va…
True, on all points, but it wasn't just him, it's been a decades long process of multiple parts of the economy failing imo. One does wonder though how things would be if we simply cancelled zoning and other needlessly bureaucratic development restrictions in the 80s, and enabled automatically correcting policy that was outside the hands of both property owners and politicians. Every time I see an anti tower sign in e…
Minneapolis abolished the single-family zoning and parking requirements in 2018. And it worked, developers swarmed the city like vultures attracted to carrion.
Madison did no such nonsense.
Can you guess the impact of these policies on housing costs?
The house price growth in Minneapolis _accelerated_, just like in the nearby Madison. Here are the price growth charts: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1COwL
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The housing situation in Canada is insane and is so obviously due to not building enough housing and bringing too many people into the country via immigration. The fact that it costs 1200$/month for a room in a rural area is incredibly damning. I went to college in Ottawa, and now I live in Austin Texas. It's similar in size, although Austin has been growing more lately. Curiously, they are also both capitols, colleg…
> Ottawa has no shortage of land Relatedly, post-amalgamation Ottawa is very big: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/fb3tzy/the_size_of... This is also an interesting (if less relevant) Ottawa size comparison: https://old.reddit.com/r/Suburbanhell/comments/ov59fv/round_...
I have the sense that if these suburbs had to figure out they're own shorter term scaling strategy, especially without being able to infinitely kick the infrastructure can down the road, things would be required to change a bit more rapidly. What they have instead are these miserable little cabin-esque bungalows with deer running about, concrete that is literally crumbling to gravel, and a very weird thread of prejudice against apartments of any kind.
They also do a lot of compulsory psychiatric detention: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychiatric-bulletin... > Finnish mental health legislation takes a medical approach to compulsory measures, emphasising the need for treatment of psychiatric patients over civil liberties concerns... Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000 inhabitants, about 214 compared with 93 in the UK and 11 in Italy. >…
The problem is that there are very different groups of people we're talking about, so much so that throwing them all under the "homeless" umbrella doesn't make sense. It's like saying car accidents are a traffic design problem, not an alcohol problem. Sure, both things can lead to traffic accidents, but they're pretty different problems.
People who temporarily need some assistance to get back on there feet are in a categorically different group than the people who are currently unable to function in society. These are fundamentally different problems.
I've seen how D.C. has tried housing first. It's given thousands of individuals free apartments, for life as far as I can tell, some in very expensive areas. It's been an enormous failure, since housing doesn't actually solve the very serious underlying problems that many of these people have. A lot of long-term residents to flee places that were once (comparatively) affordable because of rising crime and violence. The Washington Post has occasionally covered this [1][2].
I watched a neighborhood meeting recently about the issue. The city does wellness checks on the people in the program - but they can just completely ignore them, and nothing happens. Long term residents have been forced out after people in the program have attacked them or threatened to kill them and the city doesn't do anything, and doesn't even remove them from the program. A councilmember was taking part in the meeting, and had nothing to say other than he was looking into ways that the city could provide more help to people in the program.
The linked article is bordering on misinformation by not mentioning Finland's compulsory commitment, and also ignoring the failures of housing first in the U.S. like D.C.'s that haven't included that aspect. That's why a lot of these programs end up failing - people try to pick and choose the elements that they want, and ignore necessary elements that they find inconvenient. In the end, that doesn't help anyone.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-housed-t...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/08/dc-paid-h...
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How could the United States end homelessness? It is a mix of federal government, state governments, and local/county/municipal governments. The level of government best suited to do the actual work is hamstrung... if any one city fixes homelessness (somehow), more homeless will show up. If they do that again for the new arrivals, more homeless show up. The first to solve it is punished with tens of thousands of newly…
> The first to solve it is punished with tens of thousands of newly arriving homeless I've seen nothing to support this claim. It does fit the right-wing disinformation pattern of demonizing people, encouraging division and hate between people, undermine social programs, and making baseless claims to put others in the defensive position of having to disprove them. Can you support that claim? Here's some evidence to t…