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I was watching a documentary on homelessness in America recently, and now I have a few questions. Why can't cities create low rent or tax subsidized housing for the homeless? It seems like the cities have enough money to provide safe transitional opportunities for people who have a reasonable need. Is it feasible for large cities to do this? If they can do it, why don't they?
I'll go ahead and respond to the OP; I believe cities do create the mentioned housing as well as payment vouchers, whether these measures are considered acceptable adequate are where most of the heated debate does come from. I think people in the USA have this perception that everyone deserves their own house with a yard and every child must have their own bed room this seems to be the standard everyone works towards. What is reasonable I can't answer, I believe every one who works should be able to find housing of some type that is safe and clean, I believe that home ownership is something you work towards and once obtained you should take care of it.
How much do you expect society to provide? How do you define reasonable need?
Because creating that kind of housing costs a lot of money, and cities don't have enough money to build it. The large cities have other large problems, all of which are expensive to solve, and building housing for the homeless is politically unpopular, so it gets relatively little in terms of resources. Some cities do create low-income housing, often in conjunction with state and federal programs, and people scream about "welfare housing" in their neighborhood.
Some homeless simply don't want it. They don't want free housing the puts any restraints upon them.
Toledo, Ohio.
They tried to convert the waterfront, a failed government boondoggle of immense proportions, to homeless housing and nobody came. Even in the dead of winter nobody came.
The problem is there were some restrictions among them being 1)no drugs, 2)no alcohol and 3)you had to be in at 10:00 PM and nobody wanted to do that since it would interrupt party time.
Some people simply can't be helped in a free society. There are people in your city right now where you could give them a free house with free utilities and an extra $2,000 per month cash to live on and inside of one year they'd be homeless again.
I know, sad to see homeless but some people you simply can not help because they don't want it. Or they want it yet will refuse to live by any rules.
Some homeless simply don't want it. They don't want free housing the puts any restraints upon them.
Toledo, Ohio.
They tried to convert the waterfront, a failed government boondoggle of immense proportions, to homeless housing and nobody came. Even in the dead of winter nobody came.
The problem is there were some restrictions among them being 1)no drugs, 2)no alcohol and 3)you had to be in at 10:00 PM and nobody wanted to do that since it would interrupt party time.
Some people simply can't be helped in a free society. There are people in your city right now where you could give them a free house with free utilities and an extra $2,000 per month cash to live on and inside of one year they'd be homeless again.
I know, sad to see homeless but some people you simply can not help because they don't want it. Or they want it yet will refuse to live by any rules.
What's up with 10 pm? Some people have jobs where they get out of work at midnight. Are they just out of luck?
I was watching a documentary on homelessness in America recently, and now I have a few questions. Why can't cities create low rent or tax subsidized housing for the homeless? It seems like the cities have enough money to provide safe transitional opportunities for people who have a reasonable need. Is it feasible for large cities to do this? If they can do it, why don't they?
There are five reasons why we cannot solve homelessness
1. Government does not have any more money and is heavily indebted and cannot provide for the poor.
2. Government have made it very expensive to build or buy housing by raising taxes and inflation (through Fractional Reserve banking and money printing)
3. People who are homeless are in many cases not only unemployed but they are drug users and rather buy drugs for their welfare than pay their rent. Land lords and government seldom want to help them out because of their drug addiction
4. Massive immigration makes it difficult to catch up with housing and in particular in larger metropolitan areas
5. United States has an unemployment rate which is historically high. If under-unemployment, discouraged workers and others who cannot live on their salary or are just not in the system (the definition of unemployment was changed in 1994 for political reasons) unemployment would be over 20 percent. More so, we know that incomes go down because of inflation, outsourcing of jobs, automatization, indebted unemployed and immigration (increase supply of labor).
This is not only a US problem but it is a fact in all Western countries other than maybe more responsible countries like Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland (sort of), Norway, Finland, Australia, New Zealand and Austria. Liberalism, left-wing libertarianism and socialism is what causing homelessness. Stop voting Democrat and at least you would see some improvement.
Utah solved their homeless problem by giving homeless people homes.
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