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> I'm not understanding how housing that is in use can be considered supply available for others. Have you been to the US? From the amount of homeless and peo

> I'm not understanding how housing that is in use can be considered supply available for others. Have you been to the US? From the amount of homeless and people living in tents and cars, AFAICT the expectation from this society is that people that can't afford rent for whatever reason should just live on the street. The poor do not deserve a roof. --- Kind of sarcasm, but kind of true.

omegaworks 5y ago
>The poor do not deserve a roof. Is exactly the implication of market-based housing. I was hoping that my explanation would help to illustrate how facilitating eviction won't help with rising homelessness. How it alone can actually foster the growth of homelessness. "Supply" created by evicting tenants is only supply for the people that can afford the new price.
- nate_meurer 5y ago
  I think it would be more accurate to say it's the implication of artificial barriers to supply, such as restrictive zoning. The government won't build you a home, at least not the kind you'd want to live in.
  - omegaworks 5y ago
    >The government won't build you a home, at least not the kind you'd want to live in. The government needs to get out of the way of people trying to build homes, and it needs to protect the people that are currently housed. Eviction enforcement is orthogonal to these concerns.
_-david-_ 5y ago
Many poor have the option (depending on location and availability) to live in homeless shleters. Even when given the option many choose to not live there. My understanding is the shelters often require no drugs or alchol and that is a deal breaker for some homeless people.
- volta83 5y ago
  > My understanding is the shelters often require no drugs or alchol and that is a deal breaker for some homeless people. My understanding is that many do not consider homless shelters a dignifying place to live in: no private space, no private room, etc. They'd rather live in their care or their tent where they have some "me" space, than in a shelter. In Germany, for example, the government would pay for your rent before letting you sleep on the street, car, or tent. They don't consider shelters a dignifying place to live either, and having a sane place to live is pretty much a pre-requisite for being able to turn your life around.
  - ensignavenger 5y ago
    Is this Wikipedia article incorrect about the homeless in Germany? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Germany
    - volta83 5y ago
      I think that article is accurate. Those are 2014 numbers, which is when Germany took 1 million of refugees, which are counted as "homeless" since they have no "home". Refugees were initially moved into refugee camps, so you didn't see them in cities, and then they were and still are being slowly integrated. Refugee camps are no place to for people to live, but if you are escaping from a war zone, they are better than staying in the war zone. Germany does provide (1) housing and (2) a living way to unemployed inhabitants without unemployment benefits, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept#Hartz_IV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept#Hartz_IV Requesting it isn't hard. I know many highly educated people that suddenly had no income or were evicted, e.g., due to loosing all "student benefits" right the same day they finished university, including housing, being evicted a couple of days later. They got Hartz IV benefits in a matter of hours, which paid for an apartment and gave them 400 EUR or so per month for food and basic stuff (you can live an ok-ish life with that if housing is covered). But most homeless I saw in the streets in Germany, which you can actually just go and talk to, didn't want to receive any help from the state, had psychological problems, didn't want to receive medical attention, etc. Due to how the German system for this works, it is actually super hard to help these people. Still, in a sense, the people that are homeless in Germany, is because at least in some way, they want to. Since not being homeless - with the exception of refugees - is as easy as going by an office, signing a sheet of paper, and the government pays for your rent, heating, water, electricity, internet, clothes, work training, healthcare and on top gives you 400 EUR that you can spend however you want (food, or just booze, etc.). For the refugees... Germany is tight on housing, and new developments are slow, so being 1 million houses short (for 1% of the population), and then taking 1 million refugees on top, their access to housing is improving very slowly. I'd say they are free to apply for asylum somewhere else, but pretty much everywhere else the conditions are much worse for them. --- For context, relative to Germany's population, the 1 million of refugees Germany took per capita would be similar to the US taking 4-5 million refugees, in a very short period of time. IIRC, the US took less than 20k refugees from a war-zone they are very responsible for. At least they are consistent: they don't care about their homeless, and they don't care about the homeless they create everywhere else in the world. Then they are surprised when the homeless that end up growing up in ISIS camps end up flying planes into their skyscrapers.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>Have you been to the US? >From the amount of homeless and people living in tents and cars, AFAICT the expectation from this society is that people that can't afford rent for whatever reason should just live on the street. Have you ever been to the US other than the west coast? There's the occasional tent in a discreet spot in a vacant lot or under a bridge and the occasional car being lived out of at a truck stop. Maybe if you got every person living on the streets (vs a shelter) in a city to pick the same spot you'd have enough to be described as a "camp". It's nothing like you see on the west coast where the homeless are practically everywhere.
- volta83 5y ago
  > Have you ever been to the US other than the west coast? Been to Florida, Boston, NYC, Washington DC, etc. Homeless people everywhere.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    No. They simply are not everywhere. !!!!! People living on the streets are not apparently more numerous in NYC, Boston, DC and the litany of other east coast and Midwest cities I have lived in or gone to for business than they are in London, Belfast and Antwerp (my limited first hand experience with western europe). You'll get the occasional tent somewhere, a car being lived out of in a parking lot, but it is by no means rampant. Heck, places that are known for being dumps, Chicago, Gary, Baltimore, Newark, etc. have far, far less homeless people on the streets than Seattle does. Now, if you has said "Seattle, LA, San Fransisco" I would agree with you. Other than a few wealthy suburbs that actively kick out the homeless you'd have a hard time finding a park without a tent in it. But to frame rampant homelessness as a US problem or a liberal cities problem when it is almost purely a west coast problem is pure falsehood. Just stop lying!
    - volta83 5y ago
      I'm comparing with Germany, Italy and Spain, which is where I've lived in Europe. A group of 5 homeless people in each of the cities i've lived there would have been a huge group. I've continuously encountered groups of 20-50 homeless people living in Boston, NYC, Miami, etc. That's an order of magnitude more than what I consider "normal". The west coast is another order of magnitude higher, with groups of 100s of homeless people around seattle, san francisco, san diego, LA, etc. But that not makes the situation in the east coast cities i've visited "good". I consider the situation in the east coast "horrible", and in the west coast "war-zone like", when compared with the cities where I've lived in europe (madrid, barcelona, milan, munich, stuttgart, etc.).

omegaworks 5y ago

>The poor do not deserve a roof. Is exactly the implication of market-based housing. I was hoping that my explanation would help to illustrate how facilitating eviction won't help with rising homelessness. How it alone can actually foster the growth of homelessness. "Supply" created by evicting tenants is only supply for the people that can afford the new price.

nate_meurer 5y ago
I think it would be more accurate to say it's the implication of artificial barriers to supply, such as restrictive zoning. The government won't build you a home, at least not the kind you'd want to live in.
- omegaworks 5y ago
  >The government won't build you a home, at least not the kind you'd want to live in. The government needs to get out of the way of people trying to build homes, and it needs to protect the people that are currently housed. Eviction enforcement is orthogonal to these concerns.

_-david-_ 5y ago

Many poor have the option (depending on location and availability) to live in homeless shleters. Even when given the option many choose to not live there. My understanding is the shelters often require no drugs or alchol and that is a deal breaker for some homeless people.

volta83 5y ago
> My understanding is the shelters often require no drugs or alchol and that is a deal breaker for some homeless people. My understanding is that many do not consider homless shelters a dignifying place to live in: no private space, no private room, etc. They'd rather live in their care or their tent where they have some "me" space, than in a shelter. In Germany, for example, the government would pay for your rent before letting you sleep on the street, car, or tent. They don't consider shelters a dignifying place to live either, and having a sane place to live is pretty much a pre-requisite for being able to turn your life around.
- ensignavenger 5y ago
  Is this Wikipedia article incorrect about the homeless in Germany? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Germany
  - volta83 5y ago
    I think that article is accurate. Those are 2014 numbers, which is when Germany took 1 million of refugees, which are counted as "homeless" since they have no "home". Refugees were initially moved into refugee camps, so you didn't see them in cities, and then they were and still are being slowly integrated. Refugee camps are no place to for people to live, but if you are escaping from a war zone, they are better than staying in the war zone. Germany does provide (1) housing and (2) a living way to unemployed inhabitants without unemployment benefits, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept#Hartz_IV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept#Hartz_IV Requesting it isn't hard. I know many highly educated people that suddenly had no income or were evicted, e.g., due to loosing all "student benefits" right the same day they finished university, including housing, being evicted a couple of days later. They got Hartz IV benefits in a matter of hours, which paid for an apartment and gave them 400 EUR or so per month for food and basic stuff (you can live an ok-ish life with that if housing is covered). But most homeless I saw in the streets in Germany, which you can actually just go and talk to, didn't want to receive any help from the state, had psychological problems, didn't want to receive medical attention, etc. Due to how the German system for this works, it is actually super hard to help these people. Still, in a sense, the people that are homeless in Germany, is because at least in some way, they want to. Since not being homeless - with the exception of refugees - is as easy as going by an office, signing a sheet of paper, and the government pays for your rent, heating, water, electricity, internet, clothes, work training, healthcare and on top gives you 400 EUR that you can spend however you want (food, or just booze, etc.). For the refugees... Germany is tight on housing, and new developments are slow, so being 1 million houses short (for 1% of the population), and then taking 1 million refugees on top, their access to housing is improving very slowly. I'd say they are free to apply for asylum somewhere else, but pretty much everywhere else the conditions are much worse for them. --- For context, relative to Germany's population, the 1 million of refugees Germany took per capita would be similar to the US taking 4-5 million refugees, in a very short period of time. IIRC, the US took less than 20k refugees from a war-zone they are very responsible for. At least they are consistent: they don't care about their homeless, and they don't care about the homeless they create everywhere else in the world. Then they are surprised when the homeless that end up growing up in ISIS camps end up flying planes into their skyscrapers.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

>Have you been to the US? >From the amount of homeless and people living in tents and cars, AFAICT the expectation from this society is that people that can't afford rent for whatever reason should just live on the street. Have you ever been to the US other than the west coast? There's the occasional tent in a discreet spot in a vacant lot or under a bridge and the occasional car being lived out of at a truck stop. Maybe if you got every person living on the streets (vs a shelter) in a city to pick the same spot you'd have enough to be described as a "camp". It's nothing like you see on the west coast where the homeless are practically everywhere.

volta83 5y ago
> Have you ever been to the US other than the west coast? Been to Florida, Boston, NYC, Washington DC, etc. Homeless people everywhere.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  No. They simply are not everywhere. !!!!! People living on the streets are not apparently more numerous in NYC, Boston, DC and the litany of other east coast and Midwest cities I have lived in or gone to for business than they are in London, Belfast and Antwerp (my limited first hand experience with western europe). You'll get the occasional tent somewhere, a car being lived out of in a parking lot, but it is by no means rampant. Heck, places that are known for being dumps, Chicago, Gary, Baltimore, Newark, etc. have far, far less homeless people on the streets than Seattle does. Now, if you has said "Seattle, LA, San Fransisco" I would agree with you. Other than a few wealthy suburbs that actively kick out the homeless you'd have a hard time finding a park without a tent in it. But to frame rampant homelessness as a US problem or a liberal cities problem when it is almost purely a west coast problem is pure falsehood. Just stop lying!
  - volta83 5y ago
    I'm comparing with Germany, Italy and Spain, which is where I've lived in Europe. A group of 5 homeless people in each of the cities i've lived there would have been a huge group. I've continuously encountered groups of 20-50 homeless people living in Boston, NYC, Miami, etc. That's an order of magnitude more than what I consider "normal". The west coast is another order of magnitude higher, with groups of 100s of homeless people around seattle, san francisco, san diego, LA, etc. But that not makes the situation in the east coast cities i've visited "good". I consider the situation in the east coast "horrible", and in the west coast "war-zone like", when compared with the cities where I've lived in europe (madrid, barcelona, milan, munich, stuttgart, etc.).