this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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The real anti homeless infrastructure is cheap or free housing
You forgot to add "in city centers". Nobody wants free housing where it's already cheap.
I live out in the boonies. It's cheaper here, but not really when you factor in the costs of travel to get literally anything. Your money is just going into different pockets.
Sparse areas have other costs. Like, you can't get anywhere without a car, there's fewer jobs, less social stuff. Cities have much higher potential on most metrics that matter.
There are plenty of cheap cities, but it’s the high cost coastal cities being asked to provide free housing.
Depends on the country, "cheap" in NL is still like 150k for a one bedroom appartment in de "middle of knowwhere"
City centers might be a bit much but suburbs are a lot more reasonable. And I don't mean the single detached house style suburbs.
Let's consider a tax on vacant homes. If landlords got charged market rent for vacancies the house prices would plummet.
Grace to second homeowners or set-length renovations.
Why grace to send homeowners? Tax those people, nobody needs to own a second house and pay some form of reduced taxes. Tax it at the same rate money on the bank is taxed (if not already) and if it is rented out, tax that rent income as well.
You're right. It should be all 2+ homeowners. I gave the concession because my target is the ultra rich and the rich, not just the boomers that bought at the right time and have holiday homes.
In my head I could see if we all pushed for 2+ homes instead of 3+ homes then the result would be only to tax the second home and not the 3rd, 4th, etc.
Although the best result would be to tax the 2+, i need to attack the rich and ultra rich right now. Those fuckers are really ruining it for the rest of us
If you really want to tax the rich you need to fix the loaning system in the US and stop the normalisation of taking loans for everything is part of that. You need a 30.000$ car if you can only afford it with a lone a 5000$ car will be fine etc
How is taxing 3% of inventory going to make prices “plummet”?
Sorry, I never mentioned USA. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/ Its about 10%.
would the tax be based on the number of livable units in the home?
In this fantasy, market rate for comparable houses, so that's usually based on sqft, rooms and location. If you're thinking apartments in a complex I would say each apartment is a unit and taxed fair market value. I wasn't thinking about taxing spare rooms, just to avoid taxes on middle class. All of my hair brained ideas target the wealthy.
It's actually social services. You gotta treat the reason they're homeless in the first place.
To my knowledge, "housing first" programs work pretty good
Social Services doesn’t treat physical disability (because most are untreatable).
Free housing for disabled people gives them a home, even if they can’t work and earn income due to disability.
Or just, like, free housing in general?
You're joking, right? Federal disability benefits are the social services that address physical disability.
Usually it's a lack of money.
It depends on which homeless group you're talking about.
Whenever the subject of homelessness comes up, people seem to think the issue is only people who are temporarily down on their luck and just need a hand up.
They're not the group that's the main issue. The main issue is the people who are chronically homeless because they have an untreated mental illness, are treating that mental illness with drugs, or are just using drugs.
Their issue isn't a lack of money, it's a lack of help to actually be able to function in society. Because just giving them a house and money isn't treating the cause of their issue.
Think of it like crash dieting. Sure, you'll probably lose weight, but if you don't make the changes to address the reason you got fat in the first place, it's not a long term solution.
Chronic homelessness also causes drug addiction and severe mental illness, and even physical disability due to being mentally and physically traumatized every day, starving, lacking for water, being assaulted, being robbed, being harrassed / arrested for existing while homeless, being exposed to extreme heat and cold, wearing through your shoes and walking everywhere... etc etc.
(Look up the Grants Pass decision from last year. It is now literally illegal to exist in public while homeless, almost every state and city in the country has used that to justify cracking down on the homeless... it is now literally illegal to exist while homeless)
The vast majority of people who are, or at risk of becoming homeless... well the most common causes are losing a job and not being able to find a new one, having a sudden unexpected massive expense (rent getting jacked up, medical bills, etc), or fleeing domestic violence.
Source is me, I used to be a data analyst / db admin for a large network of homeless shelters.
You are 100% ass backwards wrong that the main problem is 'drug addicts and the mentally ill become homeless.'
Yes, that is a significant chunk, but only about 15%.
The other 85% is fleeing domestic violence, getting kicked out or fleeing a bad home situation because you are as queer or trans or being abused by culty religious wackos, and then all the financial root causes.
They are the people who are infact temporarily down on their luck and just need a safety net.
Further, the proportion of this 85% who just needs a safety net and doesn't need total rehabilitation?
It is growing. It is getting larger as the economy collapses.
Its just that the most visible and most problematic and most 'newsworthy' homeless tends to be in the 'needs serious, long term, complex help' category, so thats what people think it is.
You'd be amazed how many people and families live in their cars, or bounce around to a new motel every 3 weeks... while also working a or multiole jobs. If you just give them a few thousand bucks, chances are quite high that they'll be able to escape the trap they're stuck in on their own.
It is something like 10x to 20x more cost effective from a big picture standpoint, accounting for all org costs... to just give people emergency money to pay their missed rent for them than it is to house them in a shelter you operate.
... In summary, sure, yes, for some, the problem is significant mentall illness and/or drug addiction that necessitates a more hands on, intensive solution.... but for the vast majority of homeless and at risk of becoming homeless, the most effective direct solution literally is 'pay their rent and help them find a job untill they get back to stability.'
...
The actual most effective solution to homelessness is to build affordable housing by taxing the rich and upzoning or completely reworking economically wasteful districts (single family home neighborhoods), and also investing in public transit so that cars (which are massively unaffordable for the poor) are no longer a requirement for having a job or interacting with the rest of society.
Oh right, that and wiping out our private healthcare system and going universal, medical debt is the most common cause of bankruptcy in the US.
(The next two are losing a job and rent/mortgage hikes)
Personally, I am a fan of a progressive tax on rental rates that is legally mandated to be directly reinvested into:
Building new, non-profit, government agency run, affordable housing
&
Taking over existing buildings and converting them to the former
&
Maintianing such properties.
If idiot apartment developers and homes built to rent developers only want to build 'luxury' units and charge 'luxury' rates, if small time landlords want to rent out their second or third home, or airbnb it....
...tax the landlord directly via a continuous, not tiered, progressive metric anchored on area median income and area median rental rate, which climbs in severity the higher the rent rate is.
This causes pass through cost to the renter, but that's the point. 'Luxury' units become even more expensive, the consumer/renter either balks at this at rents a more modest place, and then the landlords and developers learn to build more modest places or charge less... or the renters/consumers pay the stupid high rent, and directly fund affordable housing for those below area median income by doing so.
Its functionally similar to rent control in desired and actual effect, but with less downsides, and massive upsides.
Its also maybe actually politically possible to pull off in some American cities, unlike a wealth tax that would have to be done at the federal level, which is currently a clownshow of senile/corrupt/cult sycophant demons.
Do you have stats for the assertion that homelessness isn't primarily an issue of money? I'm a "yes, and" type so I believe we should do both, but considering the success rate of housing first, we should start there.
Yeah...I've always found it odd how internet dwellers seem to completely ignore the mentall illness and drug issues that cause and exacerbate much of homelessness.
That's not to say we shouldn't be compassionate, but the issue is a hell of a lot more complex than just giving them a house and nothing else.
It feels good to say “give things to the poor”.
It’s no fun to say “force mentally ill addicts into treatment“.
Well then we might have to reopen all those mental institutions that Reagan closed (only with ya know modern treatment).
Why didn't we ever reopen them?
I mean, I know why we don't now, but we had a few decades since Reagan of occasionally reasonable administrations...
Because you'd have to propose increasing taxes. Republicans/Reagan cut the top tax rate in half (70->35) and lucked into one of the best economic growths for a while as the Carter/Volker shock finally panned out and interest rates were dropped. It's why Reagonmics and a trickle down economy were able to remain major Republicans platforms since then.
So proposing a tax increase viewed as bad for the economy was a non-starter. The capture of both political parties to capitalism and business was probably more a kicked can from Mccarthy anticommunism stuff.
Im sure you're right, but.... Couldn't we just take, like, one knob from one of our billion dollar fighter jets, and pay for mental and social services that way?
Not even from every fighter of that type, just pick the one plane that's always down for maintenance anyway and, like, lock the AC to one temperature or something. Surely that tiny bit of a multi billion dollar airframe could cover some worthwhile social services?
Mental issues and drug or alcohol issue are most common reason where I live.
No but see they need to be punished so they still exist as an example to motivate workers and create an internal other to justify police.
Not to help them. Why would we help them? Stop trolling.
I was always scared of becoming homeless when I was a kid. It motivates people to work hard: the beatings will continue until morale improves.
And that fear would be worth every street in the city smelling like piss at all times even if it didn't enable rampant exploitation and rent seeking!
That's not enough, well it might be enough in the US, but here in NL people who are officially Dutch or have been through the process as a refuge to get housing and food etc. Should have at least some kind of shelter.
Then there are still the like 2 (estimation) people in this country who choose to be homeless for whatever reason. I don't try to judge, but there might be some mental issues involved.
And then there are the people who came here from other countries, but haven't gone through the official channels. Some of which came to work, lost their job and cannot find somewhere else to work. Generally this group has housing paid for by their employer, but if you don't have one you don't have a house, at least not here in NL.
There are probably other examples in other countries where basically everybody can have some place to live, but there are still homeless people. I don't believe you just need free housing, you probably need some extra social security and the social opinion on homeless people or people who are at the bottom of society needs to change.
nimbyism prevents that,