Housing first is a proven strategy in dealing with homelessness. The fact that every state has not adopted these policies to help eliminate the homeless population shows this is more a cultural issue than a lack of housing.
According to the Census there are a lot more empty houses than homeless people. Let that sink in and you start to realize all is not what it seems.
Until someone is safe and has their basic needs met it is impossible to work on issues such as mental health and addiction.
The solution exists but it is going to take a lot of our time, money, and most importantly a cultural shift away from blaming people to accomplish it.
If we could fix our homelessness then we would show that we truly care about our citizens rather than just paying a lip service to our most vulnerable people.
According to the Census there are a lot more empty houses than homeless people. Let that sink in and you start to realize all is not what it seems.
This particular statistic needs to be handled carefully. There are problems with both its definition and its nature. Empty housing has a fairly broad definition that includes housing that is unfinished, in the middle of repairs, or unfit for habitation.
The nature of housing with relationship to homelessness depends a lot on where the homeless people are and where the housing is. Empty housing in towns and cities that are depopulating is unlikely to be all that useful. Simply taking people from cities with high levels of homelessness, ripping them out of their communities, and plopping them down into communities that other people are leaving is not a favor.
Also, you shouldn’t just warehouse unhoused people in whatever housing is available. Many of them have mental illnesses that need good access to mental health services, transit, and jobs. Just because they’re under a roof doesn’t mean the job is done. The housing should be tailored to the various populations that it will be serving.
I encourage you to lookup up Housing First if you have not already. While it may be misleading to say there are 16 million vacant home to half a million homeless people (32 homes for every homeless person), for the reasons you mentioned, it is entirely possible house these people.
No one who knows about this issue is thinking about warehousing people. Like you said they need a stable place to live, access to services, transportation, and work when they are ready.
I’m familiar with Housing First. I mostly just didn’t want to see a misleading use of statistics left unchallenged. Statistics around housing are difficult to grasp, so I often see them used in a misleading way, usually unknowingly.
Take one statistic, the rental vacancy rate in my city, Portland. It has lately been around 4%. Given the number of homeless people in the city, that feels like a travesty. But when you start to do calculations, that turns out to be an average of 2 weeks every four years. If you have tenants moving out after four years, that’s barely enough time to do a few repairs, let the paint dry, and finding new tenants. What seemed like a loose market turns out to be a very tight market.
Not exactly doable since living spaces legally must have egress windows, and shopping malls… Don’t really have many outer walls for that compared to the amount of space internally they have
The problem with giving the homeless houses is that if you begin free houses to people you make the big banks and investors lose money. What makes it a problem? Well, where’s your money at?
If only we could get governments and communities to back credit unions over banks.
Houses should not be investments. They break down and should depreciate like any other physical asset. If you built your retirement solely on your house then that’s nobody’s fault but your own.
Your money is in the bank, and banks, which a re for-profit, make a lot of their money on real state and mortgages. Not sure where you get making houses investments from, but for banks, it works out excellently, and when it doesn’t, “Too big to fail” demands they (as in their CEO bonuses) get rescued anyway.
Cars are investments for banks too, but I’m specifically talking about buyers. Selling a house for more than you bought it is the most absurd thing I’ve ever seen, and that’s coming from someone buying a house as we speak. I should not be able to sell this thing for 2x its value in ten years.
I mean houses cost money, and we know the government don’t like spending in the first place, they just worried about public image not the root of the problem
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