Millionaire? Nice. Billionaires should follow suit, but 1000x
(With ~800 billionaires in the US, that's 79,200,000 homes)
this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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How many homes do we actually need?
Funny story, we actually have enough housing for everyone. It just isn't always where people want to live, and corporate landlords would rather leave a space vacant to drive up rents than make all of their inventory available, so there is a shit ton of residential (and commercial) property that is basically abandoned.
Some estimates say there are as many as 12 vacant homes per homeless person ~~this country~~ in the United States.
Edit: millionaire in OP is from Canada
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There's also the fact that many of those houses have sat vacant and have been left to rot for many years, meaning that plenty of them need to be demolished and rebuilt before they can be lived in. Small towns have been dying for decades as suburban sprawl consumes ever-increasing amounts of land and bleeds our cities dry of tax revenue, forcing them to continue making more suburbs to pay off the previous ones.
What we need is tax on vacant property. Make it a ladder system so its worse based on number of vacant units and value.
And eliminate corporate ownership of residential property. Tax the shit out of anyone owning more than three residences, and bring property values back down to earth. Bail out homeowners who owe mortgages for more than the value of the properties, and let the market self-correct.
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The official homeless number for 2024 in the US was 771,480. That's probably just reported and not actual.
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Good for him, but this is pretty much an Orphan-Crushing Machine moment.
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I see no reason to believe that letting this guy make unilateral decisions is somehow better than taxing him appropriately and using the revenue to build public housing.
This statement might be true, but we're not taxing him. Should he just donate his money to the government?
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If every billionaire did this and ended homelessness perhaps they would have a point about their wealth hoarding. I won't be holding my breath for this to happen though. Tax the rich!
Absolutely. We don’t need kings making decisions like this. The downside is the difficulty in forcing government and the anti-help-anyone segment of our society to spend such taxation correctly to actually help people.
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Sure there are lots of failures to the way we govern ourselves. This shouldn't be a need. The reality is that it is a need and that person did what he could. Have you?
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Where are they built in relation to necessary services, and what other services are available?
Is there on site support for drugs and mental health issues?
Is anybody's stuff going to be safe there? Or are they dumped out of sight and mind?
You have to 'invest' in preventing the causes of homelessness in the first place, which has proved impossible under capitalism. I doubt corrupt dictatorships of the proletariat such as the Soviet Union did any better.
I like this because it is both a good story about an individual helping their community and it is proof individual action alone is not enough to rely on to solve social problems.
And why were they homeless?
Why were they homeless???
A lot of people talk about taxing folks like this and then using the money to supply the housing.
The thing is, given the money, few people could pull this off well. The site isn't just being plopped down; from the sound of the article in the comments it's being actively developed as a community with other safeguards and support, by someone who sunk a lot of time into finding out what would work to help people rather than just appear to help.
A scheme like this is hard to replicate because, in addition to money, it needs a core team with a clear vision and the time to really make it a focus of their lives. It also needs a community that will embrace it - for example it would likely work in the town I grew up in, but the town I work in (and am sadly forced to live in) now would likely drive such a project to failure.
It's a good idea that worked against the odds, and should be celebrated for that alone.
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Now imagine if billionaires did it with their infinite wealth......sad. humanity and capitalism is just cancer.
If we can convince them their dick size is measured by how much charity / benefit they do with their wealth we will solve many of the world's problems overnight
I still don't get why "rich lists" aren't done using tax returns. It's a clear yardstick to compare egos by.
It also has the side effect of encouraging civic contribution via taxes. By the time you're that rich, money is just a score. Make it worthwhile not to dodge taxes, and tax dodging will drop off.
I'm of two minds.
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shitty bungalows are what is killing infrastructure costs and perpetuating urban sprawl. We have a generous home in a hyper-dense housing area and - thanks to triple paned windows and concrete - no claustrophobia.
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tiny homes for people returning from homelessness may be a good idea. The unfair concerns are mitigated by very repairable units separated from neighbours.
We need to keep these as transitional housing, though, and a feeder into a "starter" unit in proper dense mixed-use: every block (hectare) taken for tiny homes is 3 million cubic meters of space taken from a land budget we're already overdrawn on.
I think thats always the hope that they are first steps of stability to move up. None of the projects like this I've seen have been intended to be life time residence.
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Not everyone agrees with this thought but I'm also for allowing unused city parcels to be used for homeless tents and such. My city does everything it can to hide homelessness without addressing any of the underlying issues
Source? Did it actually work? Very cool if so.
If you give a homeless person a home, then by definition, they are no longer homeless.
On a less pedantic note, yes, it should. Some countries (like mine) provide a secure place to live as step one, when helping the homeless. Having somewhere safe to sleep, keep your property, etc. makes all the other steps involved in solving your problems much easier, leading to a better success rate in getting people back on their feet.
Here's one article about it.
https://macleans.ca/society/tiny-homes-fredericton/
I don't remember where I saw this the first time, but it did mention that this had become a thing in a few American cities too (this story was from Fredericton, Canada)
My city does something like this as part of our homeless program and we're at "net-zero" homeless. It doesn't work on it's own, but the tiny homes give people a stable place to keep their stuff safe and the elements off their bodies, it gives them an address they can use for things like mail and applications, and it gives social workers a place to find them reliably. It's the start of a long process to help them back to their feet.
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