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Unused buildings are not just automatically ideal for homeless shelters The perfect is once again the enemy of the good. People always invoke the building code

Unused buildings are not just automatically ideal for homeless shelters The perfect is once again the enemy of the good. People always invoke the building code to talk about Why We Can't Do Anything despite an abundance of empty commercial real estate, but the alternative is people trying to survive in broken down cars and tents. It's a slow motion catastrophe on the scale of a natural disaster, but every attempt to address it in concrete form (ie by policymakers) is stymied by either self-styled moralists whining that it's stealth communism, or dissemblers hiding behind bureaucratic nostrums. At best you get half-assed pilot projects like tiny houses in parking lots under bridges, which only serve a small number of people and are themselves grossly insufficient.

brk 3y ago
I was mostly talking about building maintenance and upkeep. Somebody has to pay for that. Truly vacant buildings are often mothballed to the extent of having water shut off, hvac disabled, etc. Filling a building with homeless adds to costs, increases wear and tear, and those costs have to be borne by someone. It’s not about perfect being the enemy of good. It is about simple costs and overhead. The homeless people obviously can’t cover basic costs. The building owners don’t have much real incentive to donate the building for use, so in the end the vacant buildings do not equate to a solution.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Obviously, I think we should use tax money to support them because a lot of them are indigent and literally dying slowly on the street. Certainly this costs money but turning on utilities and converting the building away from its original commercial purpose seems a lot less expensive than starting from scratch or relying on some distant-future housing development policy to alleviate an urgent immediate problem. Large empty building which have already been constructed and fitted with internal infrastructure are significantly more useful for sheltering people than policy objectives that only exist on paper. Even a building with no services enabled is significantly better at providing shelter than a car or a tent because being inside a building minimizes exposure to wind, rain, and snow. Thus, buying or leasing the large empty buildings makes it a lot easier to start solving the problem in a practical way.

brk 3y ago

I was mostly talking about building maintenance and upkeep. Somebody has to pay for that. Truly vacant buildings are often mothballed to the extent of having water shut off, hvac disabled, etc. Filling a building with homeless adds to costs, increases wear and tear, and those costs have to be borne by someone. It’s not about perfect being the enemy of good. It is about simple costs and overhead. The homeless people obviously can’t cover basic costs. The building owners don’t have much real incentive to donate the building for use, so in the end the vacant buildings do not equate to a solution.

anigbrowl 3y ago
Obviously, I think we should use tax money to support them because a lot of them are indigent and literally dying slowly on the street. Certainly this costs money but turning on utilities and converting the building away from its original commercial purpose seems a lot less expensive than starting from scratch or relying on some distant-future housing development policy to alleviate an urgent immediate problem. Large empty building which have already been constructed and fitted with internal infrastructure are significantly more useful for sheltering people than policy objectives that only exist on paper. Even a building with no services enabled is significantly better at providing shelter than a car or a tent because being inside a building minimizes exposure to wind, rain, and snow. Thus, buying or leasing the large empty buildings makes it a lot easier to start solving the problem in a practical way.