Hot take: the problem with homelessness does not boil down to “count amount of homeless, count amount of houses, if the latter is larger, then capitalism is intentionally making people homeless and will collapse if they aren’t, therefore get rid of capitalism to instantly solve homelessness”.
Pay attention to the fact that there are much more homeless people per capita in cities than in half-abandoned villages, and you will realize that the problem isn’t just not having a home, but not having a home where you want to have a home, to the extent where they would rather be homeless in a city than landlords in a village.
There are obvious easy solutions, like falsely reporting that you have solved homelessness while carting people out of the city (adjusting visibility), or forcing people to live in certain places regardless of where they actually want to live (adjusting mobility), but they don’t fix the actual underlying issue.
Policy changes to address this are going to be very expensive, unless you want to reduce safety restrictions for houses, which you should not.
And not expensive because robber baron capitalism pigs, but expensive as per LTV - construction is a man hour hungry process.I think people ignore the fact that many homeless people don’t actually DO anything useful for themselves.
I know this for a fact. I was one for almost a decade, and the mentality I had, and the one held by most of my co-inhabitants on the streets was one of lazy entitlement.
No program or initiative would have helped me or solved my problem, because the problem was with me and my attitude towards the world.
Mental health and addictions aside, I think you would find that this is the main problem of almost all homeless people.
They believe they are owed something by society at large, and the handouts they receive to keep them from death only serve to strengthen that belief, until one day it sinks in that they will have to work if they want to prosper and they pick themselves up and go get work already.
In the absence of illegal mass evictions homelessness is largely a choice, rather than an unavoidable condition.
http://www.theonion.com/video/paul-ryan-spending-final-day-of-campaign-reminding-30256