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The problem is that unlike people with homes (who are generally stuck in one place — wherever their home is), homeless people have nothing holding them to place
by derefr 3y ago
The problem is that unlike people with homes (who are generally stuck in one place — wherever their home is), homeless people have nothing holding them to places inhospitable to their presence. So the homeless diffuse around countries, drifting from place to place, until they settle in an "attractor" city — a local optimum for homeless hospitable-ness (with more social-welfare programs for them; less police suppression of homelessness; milder climate; more walkability; etc.)
These attractor cities then experience undue burden of having to fight basically an entire country's homeless problem using only municipal (rather than state or federal) tax dollars; where every social welfare program they add, creates "induced demand" by making them into more of an attractor city for surrounding homeless populations.
The homed people living in these attractor cities, experience a reality where they can choose to vote in progressive parties that throw however-much money at the problem of homelessness — adding public housing, shelters, food programs, jobs programs, etc. — with the only result being ever more homeless people showing up in the city. Which causes these homed people in these attractor cities to get burned out on the idea of solving homelessness.
(An aphorism: "the river sees more water than the lakebed.")
AFAICT, the only way out of the problem, is to
1. set aside federal funding for solving homelessness (which could be done easily enough in the US if anyone without a permanent residence in a particular state, were interpreted by federal law as not being "of" any state, but still a US national, and therefore a person the federal government has a duty to take care of directly — basically the same as how the federal government does insurance, postal delivery, etc. for actively-serving members of the military); and then
2. use that funding to start offering social-welfare programs for homeless people in places that don't already have large homeless populations, with the aim of creating more, smaller attractors, dispersing the homeless population, so that it's not all having to be dealt with by just the one or two natural attractor cities per country.
Yes, both of these things are big political lifts. I see it as something like the federal highway system, or for that matter, like military bases: cases where it's in all our best interests to relinquish local NIMBYesque control, in favor of top-down eminent-domain use of land for serving the needs of the country as a whole.
- generalizations 3y agoAll you do then is turn the entire country into an "attractor country" - faced with the 'homeless problem' of the rest of the world. Which is, ironically, one of the issues raised against open borders.
- gtbcb 3y agoAgreed about the "attractor country" comment; however, at least we have some restrictions on borders. I agree with the parent comment that this issue needs to be addressed by the federal gov't. I wonder if some states could even be incentivized to support such systems by creating rehabilitation communities which would bring jobs (and yes homeless) but still more $ in general. FL and AZ sort of does this with old people and some states seem to do it for addiction treatment centers. X% of the population will always need some gov't help and Y% will need gov't help at some point. I think we need to stop negatively viewing these groups as sponges on society. Ability is a spectrum, and we don't criticize someone w Down's Syndrome, and so I don't think we should be so harsh on people who are homeless / have trouble holding down a job / low-ish IQ / and even those who fried their brain w drugs / etc. Yes, we want to avoid perverse incentives and incentivize people to be productive members of society, but we also need to recognize that some people will always need some help, and as a society, I think we should help them, striving for a future with little to no involuntary poverty.
- derefr 3y agoHomeless people are generally not allowed to cross borders pretty much anywhere in the world, except under special conditions (e.g. being considered a refugee fleeing a warzone or failed state.) This is why most countries' border services will ask short-term visitors the address of the place they'll be staying while they're there: no country, no matter how open its borders, wants you to visit with the goal of becoming a beggar on their streets. (And this is also a large part of why particular passports only let you visit particular places without a visa. The EU has internally-open borders for EU citizens, because they have mostly equalized levels of social-welfare "pressure" between countries. But no EU country will let you in from a non-EU developing country that has high levels of homelessness, if you can't prove income; and that's something the EU enforces on its member states, so that no country becomes the de-facto homeless ingress point for the whole of the EU.) Because of these measures, each country (or open-bordered region of equal-welfare countries) is mostly just dealing with its own homeless problem, not with other countries'/regions' homeless problems.