> I hate to be so harsh, but the bleeding hearts would be a lot more skeptical of housing the homeless if they started moving into their neighborhoods. I absol

> I hate to be so harsh, but the bleeding hearts would be a lot more skeptical of housing the homeless if they started moving into their neighborhoods. I absolutely agree with this, and we can find data that supports this concept quite aggressively throughout US history, with one example being that racial integration in schools stopped when it came to northern cities. It was fine as long as we pretended it was a southern problem, but today the most racially segregated schools can be found in major urban centers. Ultimately, most decisions are made emotionally, and in order to move human society to the next stage of ethical development, we will need to combine an ethical baseline of human welfare (Singer style reverse utilitarianism comes to mind) with the application of data and statistics. Unfortunately, thinking statistically is difficult, and the human mind is capable of rationalizing emotional decision making before the thought it complete. Ultimately the problem of homelessness is easily solvable from some pure mathematical/economic standpoint, but fails for the same reason that supply/demand is not a law of human society: it all depends on rational actors, a unicorn-like construct. It doesn't mean that we cannot apply data to our decision making, but it _does_ mean that we need to work our hardest to defend decisions based on high quality data, high quality data analysis, and well-replicated science. Housing first is an idea where all of the early analysis has been extremely promising, and the NIMBY-ism that surrounds it should be called out for what it is: emotional decision making that disregards data and science resulting in a lack of compassion for people. I will say it's unethical, but it's also completely and totally human.