How you scope a problem is a choice. It’s possible to make bad choices, but most people make reasonable ones. How to solve homelessness in Philadelphia, in a specific neighborhood therein, in the state of Pennsylvania, in the Eastern US, in the US as a whole, etc, are all reasonable problems to think about.
Different scopes of homelessness problem will have different extents to which supply, transportation, various policy choices, greedy investors, etc. influence the issue. Some places, reducing the value of places based on how long they’ve been empty might help, other places it may have little effect. It’s actually many related problems, rather than one big one, kind of like cancer.
And I tend to agree with what you’re saying, at smaller scopes, it really is a simpler problem. People camping outside vacant units should just be housed. Offering someone on the streets of Pittsburgh an apartment in rural Indiana might not actually be very helpful.
Scope and perspective are very important and homelessness won’t be universally solved by any one solution or cookie cutter response.
It’s wild to me though that things like housing first programs have been shown to work, vacant buildings like malls could be repurposed as shelters, golf courses could be campgrounds.
But instead they will ship homeless across state lines to places like California and New York for them to burden the state elsewhere, and homeless help programs get so grifted that it can cost $50 to put a PB&J into a homeless man’s hands.
In the end, what we can all agree on is this: We don’t have a resource problem; we have a distribution problem.
Find me an example of any city in the USA aside from NYC where the homeless population outranks the vacant home rate
I did not include this but when looking at those numbers this was the same for Seattle, for San Francisco, for Michigan, etc.
I’m not surprised if it exists but given LA and NYC have some of the highest rates of homelessness in the country I doubt there are many examples
The idea presented was never “ship homeless people all over to displace them and also put them in camps” but notice how it immediately gets twisted to the worst interpretation to defend commodity landownership
I’m not defending commodity landownership. Rent seeking behavior shouldn’t be rewarded, and I think housing people by transferring ownership of vacant units to them without remuneration to prior landlords would promote the public good.
My point was that as you change the perspective by which you look at a problem like homelessness, the casual factors change, as do the sorts of solutions that people consider. Yes, some of them are really bad at large scales, and I’d rather focus on smaller scales for that reason. At city/metro scales, it’s a lot easier to make meaningful change, and there’s something special about helping your neighbors like that. You’ve kind of made my point for me, there.
How you scope a problem is a choice. It’s possible to make bad choices, but most people make reasonable ones. How to solve homelessness in Philadelphia, in a specific neighborhood therein, in the state of Pennsylvania, in the Eastern US, in the US as a whole, etc, are all reasonable problems to think about.
Different scopes of homelessness problem will have different extents to which supply, transportation, various policy choices, greedy investors, etc. influence the issue. Some places, reducing the value of places based on how long they’ve been empty might help, other places it may have little effect. It’s actually many related problems, rather than one big one, kind of like cancer.
And I tend to agree with what you’re saying, at smaller scopes, it really is a simpler problem. People camping outside vacant units should just be housed. Offering someone on the streets of Pittsburgh an apartment in rural Indiana might not actually be very helpful.
Scope and perspective are very important and homelessness won’t be universally solved by any one solution or cookie cutter response.
It’s wild to me though that things like housing first programs have been shown to work, vacant buildings like malls could be repurposed as shelters, golf courses could be campgrounds.
But instead they will ship homeless across state lines to places like California and New York for them to burden the state elsewhere, and homeless help programs get so grifted that it can cost $50 to put a PB&J into a homeless man’s hands.
In the end, what we can all agree on is this: We don’t have a resource problem; we have a distribution problem.
Thank you for this concise summary!
Find me an example of any city in the USA aside from NYC where the homeless population outranks the vacant home rate
I did not include this but when looking at those numbers this was the same for Seattle, for San Francisco, for Michigan, etc.
I’m not surprised if it exists but given LA and NYC have some of the highest rates of homelessness in the country I doubt there are many examples
The idea presented was never “ship homeless people all over to displace them and also put them in camps” but notice how it immediately gets twisted to the worst interpretation to defend commodity landownership
I’m not defending commodity landownership. Rent seeking behavior shouldn’t be rewarded, and I think housing people by transferring ownership of vacant units to them without remuneration to prior landlords would promote the public good.
My point was that as you change the perspective by which you look at a problem like homelessness, the casual factors change, as do the sorts of solutions that people consider. Yes, some of them are really bad at large scales, and I’d rather focus on smaller scales for that reason. At city/metro scales, it’s a lot easier to make meaningful change, and there’s something special about helping your neighbors like that. You’ve kind of made my point for me, there.
Me neither but u/ragebutt also twisted my words in this way. I suggest disengaging they are so mean lol.