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The important thing to remember is that the same forces that made those people homeless are what made you pay for your overpriced apartment. All the “unlanded”
by ethanbond 6y ago
The important thing to remember is that the same forces that made those people homeless are what made you pay for your overpriced apartment.
All the “unlanded” are sharecroppers, some better paid than others. Time for some solidarity among the renter class.
- refurb 6y agoAnd what forces are those? Demand for housing?
- ethanbond 6y agoHousing prices are set as high as they need to be in order to guarantee at least “a little bit” of poverty. Everyone being housed is effectively a signal to landlords that rent is too cheap. We obviously produce enough capital to ensure everyone is housed and fed, yet housing costs simply keep rising with productivity because, well, why wouldn’t they? Zoning/NIMBYism doesn’t help either, but even with perfect zoning, prices would still rise with productivity.
- natalyarostova 6y agoThe median homeless person living on the streets of SF wouldn’t be doing fine if rent was cheaper. These are severely mentally ill people suffering from severe drug addiction comorbidities in a system that fundamentally respects their right to live this way.
- mercer 6y agoI've known a number of homeless people with serious mental illnesses who were both much happier and saner once they had an apartment (and, crucially, were helped with getting there).
- fsloth 6y agoHomelesnes can be cured only by treating housing as a basic human right. There are plenty of examples of this globally so it's a fact, not a theory or a political fad. If you prefer more equal ownership of capital there is nothing wrong with that. But that is completely orthogonal to solving 'the problem' of homelessness. Please don't confuse the two issues.
- tigen 6y agoWhat constraints do you think there should be on that basic human right, if any?
- ethanbond 6y agoThis comment seems unrelated to mine. People are made homeless because housing costs rise arbitrarily high along with productivity. To the market, the definition of “the correct price” for housing is when there is “a little bit” of poverty. If you happen to earn enough to land above that price then you are paying for your overpriced apartment. If you happen to fall below that line, you are homeless. The “force” at play is a broken pricing scheme which allows/encourages landlords to continue raising prices as high as they can possibly go, which in a super high productivity area like SFBA or NYC is extremely high.
- fsloth 6y agoHousing market and homelesness are two different things. Places with less inflated housing prices had a 'homeless problem' as well until they made home a basic human right. Hence empirically I doubt you can 'fix homelesness' by fixing the housing market. You can fix the housing market but will still have homeless problem - until you make home a human right.