this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
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Homelessness encompasses far more than rough sleeping. I agree that there are issues that many homeless people may face that wouldn't be resolved just by giving them a roof over their head. But it'd be a great start. And don't forget, a lot of homelessness is people and families in temporary or crisis housing, or couch surfing with friends and family, because they can't afford a place of their own.
I wouldn't say this contradicts anything I said, really. I don't disagree with any of this.
I bristled specifically at the ridiculously glib and reductive "solve homelessness" line. People love to think issues like these are things that have simple obvious solutions that no one thought of before their enlightenment came along and deigned to bless the rest of us.
I mean yeah, it's a glib portrayal but I don't think it's wrong to present it this way. It's a fact that a few of America's most wealthy have enough money to house every homeless person in the US, with enough to spare to keep themselves in megayachts and luxury Texan compounds. It drives home the massive wealth inequality.
It also really isn't infeasible to build enough homes to house all the homeless in the US within one or two years. It's not infeasible to spend that same amount of time setting up universal basic income and healthcare. Those three things are achievable and would make a positive, life-long difference to the majority of people experiencing homelessness.
And there are a handful of people in the US whose combined personal wealth could easily fund all that.
If they have enough to do that, then the government certainly already has enough to accomplish this, no? Even the wealthiest person on the planet's total net worth is nothing compared to what is already spent every single year by the US government.
I thought it was commonly said that there were more empty houses in the country than there are homeless people, already?
If you're talking about something that goes only to homeless people, then it's not "universal". If you're now talking about true UBI, I just don't see how it can be realistically afforded.
Back of the napkin math, a measly $10,000 to every working-age adult in the US amounts to an annual bill of over $2 trillion each year. We have no realistic way of paying for that--even if you squeezed all the billionaires completely dry, it'd only pay for it for a couple of years. And that's just $10,000.
It just doesn't seem feasible until/unless we are literally post-scarcity, from the raw numbers. And that's assuming it doesn't replace any of the welfare systems already in place--if it would, then it really wouldn't lift anyone out of anything long-term.
It's honestly very difficult to believe this, knowing all the trillions upon trillions of dollars the government has already spent over the years on issues like these, without them being 'solved'.