Even if we build cheap apartments for the homeless and fully fund it with tax payer money it actually saves tax payer money and gets the homeless out of the already over stressed healthcare system.
Most homeless are in and out of the hospital for easily preventable diagnosis that is a direct result of living on the street. This would free up a bed in the ED, free up a bed in acute care if admitted, and free up urgent care and other EMT resources.
This has been studied for YEARS. We know the answer to directly solving this without even trying to fix the other systemic issues at play here.
However, having a homeless population is good for capitalism. It’s an area where an employer can point to and say, “If you don’t work for pennies on the dollar, you’ll end up there.”
Seriously. I think the solution to the homeless crisis is to build what amounts to government-funded dorms for adults. 2-3 people to a room; literally just like a college dorm. Basic shelter for anyone who needs it, but a degree of privacy you don’t get with homeless shelters. You have roommates, but only one or two, and you get a place to safely store things. And the price would be affordable enough that the state can provide this shelter for anyone who needs it.
And a final benefit of this kind of spartan housing arrangements is that you can ensure only those who need it will take advantage of it. You don’t need to go to elaborate lengths to verify eligibility. You don’t need to have harsh income-based cutoffs. Most people do not want to live in a dorm room their whole life. That alone will ensure that only those who really need it will seek it out.
One little problem you aren’t accounting for.
Give houses to newcomers for not being self sufficient, then you’ll be attracting even more newcomers. The cycle continues.
Now, with 2nd generation immigrants, this is a good investment. Especially in aging countries such as mine.
But yeah you’re not taking in future expenses into account with your idea there.
The current amount of homeless, are there to scarecrow the potential amount of homeless away.
It’s more sane, as a society, to reduce this to refugees only.
Giving economic immigrants a free house… that’s just insane
Nobody was talking about immigrants before you did. Not sure what your point is.
Idk how it’s in your country but in my country the homeless are illegal immigrants
Sad that people want to go to your country, even if they will be homeless. Sad they find no compassion there.
In my country, the immigrants are very slightly less likely to be homeless. Little compassion here either.
I am accounting for newcomers and not being self sufficient.
In the studies and actual use cases where places have done this the homeless person is getting a 300-500sqft apartment. It’s enough to get off the street have a clean bed and running water. They can then get a job and work their way out.
The reason this works is because once you have a decent income and want to start enjoying life you can’t do that in a 300-500sqft apartment.
This isn’t just shit I’m making up, there have been cities that have done this and it fucking works.
Can you link the source then, thanks
I can provide a few, but honestly so many cities have done this, tried to do part of it and failed/succeeded, or are working on plans to do this. Portland Oregon for example had success with a homeless program that puts people in little 15x15ft sheds. It’s not much, but it’s a start and some have moved on to their own apartment. Years ago a city in Utah (I think), built a small apartment and did a study to determine it was more cost effective to provide housing than let them clog up the Healthcare and EMS resources.
One study found an average cost savings on emergency services of $31,545 per person housed in a Housing First program over the course of two years. Another study showed that a Housing First program could cost up to $23,000 less per consumer per year than a shelter program.
- Housing First
- Coalition for the Homeless
- PBS article comparing two cities
- National Alliance to End Homelessness
Here is a list of studies from the last link. Each pebble is a study with links and sources
Again, this is not something I’m just saying or making up. This has hard data backed evidence to support it.
Those 31,5k USD saved is because you don’t let them die.
My source is comparing first generation non EU immigrants their taxes to the social transfers they receive. It’s a net loss.
As I stated, it’s the 2nd generation where it’s at.
Those are the worker bees.
If these people were self sufficient then they wouldn’t have been homeless. It takes massive investments. And guess what? It pays off in the 2nd generation.
Okay, so don’t read any of the sources and stay ignorant. Homelessness can be a result of a multitude of factors and not all of them are only illegal immigrants who can’t be self-sufficient.
No where in any of the sources does it say the cost saved was because “they didn’t die”. It’s clear this goes far beyond your ability to understand and comprehend complex systems of cost analysis. You ask for sources then ignore them. Get bent.
Is it? Immigrants get jobs and pay taxes. Economic immigration can be a great economic boon if managed properly. It might be possible to generate consistent returns on investment by providing shelter, food, education and training.
A lot of economic immigrants don’t have jobs.
It’s quite difficult to get a job when everything is in a language you are at most new to.
I went to 30 headhunter firms with my wife, they all showed us the door when they realised she doesn’t speak Dutch.
Her job is cleaning. Subsidised 66% by the government (taxes). Client pays 10 euros, my wife gets 15 euros. The company gets 30 euros per hour.
She has a fucking law degree from a top 5% university in her country.
Immigration depends a lot on language, or the lingual infrastructure of the country.
2 ways. Either Belgium decides to turn English into an official language and creates an environment where English is the only language needed, or the immigrant learns Dutch.
Learning Dutch takes years.
My coworker her mom lives here for 30 years and doesn’t speak Dutch. Her aunt speaks our language fluently.
It depends on the person, but in general it’s not to be underestimated.
My wife is just going to be half time worker. Better that I work full time and that she takes care of our kid a bit more while I work full time.
My wife doesn’t pay any taxes.
As I said priorly. The real deal here is the 2nd generation. Those can be educated in belgium for the Belgian economy. Big gains for the economy.
If I go to Indonesia, what am I gonna do lol. Idk anything about indonesian stuff. There my wife would have to be the breadwinner while I just look for a job in Singapore or an English company in Batam.
I’m bit lucky that accountancy is more globalised. Law is very specific. You’re supposed to specialise and then make that your career.
That’s crazy: there are cleaners who speak the language? I thought this was a stereotypical job for immigrants because you don’t need special skills or credentials nor have to know the language. The skills are basic; you just need to work hard, be reliable and figure out how to get fast at it
The cleaners that know the language… idk mate, higher education costs 1 month’s minimum wage to fund a whole bachelor’s.
Achieving the bachelor takes effort though. The job that you get with the bachelor also is more difficult to do. More stressful.
Doesn’t really pay much more. Maybe 200 euros?
Minimum wage pays barely any taxes. While the “discount on tax” is lost as you climb the ladder.
At 3250 euros gross wage I get 2250 euros net.
At minimum wage, 2050 euros. They get 2000 euros net.
It’s not a big deal. Of course my wage will keep growing, while theirs will stagnate.
But complacency is quite the drug.
Oh no, learning the language of the country you immigrate to, the horror
Make it a requirement of continuing occupancy. Must be taking classes or working. Classes are free.
Still takes years to learn the language with those classes and these classes are social transfers to the immigrants, but a good investment with return.
The requirement is neither of those things. The requirement is self sufficiency.
If you’re rich enough, then I don’t care if you don’t learn the language and that you don’t work.
You’re spending into our economy with likely passive income coming from your global investments.
Or you have family members that take care of your cost of living. All fine.
If you want to have a job, then as I priorly stated. Either in Dutch or English.
Both would work. If the infrastructure is in English, then the ability to make immigrants self sufficient becomes a lot easier. Good for our economy.
If we don’t want to do these investments, then the immigrant needs to learn Dutch.
Those are the only options.
My wife speaks English at her job. Did 2 Dutch classes. Most of the people in flanders speak English so communication goes well.
Ego of natives to be spoken to by their preferred language is economically irrelevant so I ignore that.
The premise of this discussion was economic refugees, so I assumed we were only talking about those who are not self-sufficient.
These people can’t legally enter the country as far as I’m aware. So yeah, they become homeless.
Giving money to economic refugees that aren’t self sufficient is just… at best, turning them into baby factories for next generation worker bees.
My country has an aging population, perhaps it’s beneficial? Not sure.
Actually it’s easy to see if it’s beneficial. Look at social refugees. Their kids get higher education.
There’s enough war in the world though. We don’t need economic refugees on top of the social refugees.
But then again, need to question how easy those economic refugees are to integrate.
They aren’t traumatised by war, so it should be easier.
A lot of angles to look from
A lot of natives also don’t have jobs. Shall we kick those out too?
And if not, why do they get preferential treatment? They cost the country a lot more money than immigrants.
Well they could fix it in 2 years by this logic
So those who want to buy a house but can’t afford it are still fucked. Cool.
When more homeless people are in public housing, there’s less demand for rentals.
When there’s less demand for rentals, competition falls and rents fall too.
When rents are low, landlording becomes less profitable.
When landlording isn’t profitable, investors move their stock to higher growth assets.
When investors sell their houses, the price to buy a house falls.
To put this in simple terms: a rising tide lifts all ships. Housing the homeless improves the lives of everyone except landlords and billionaires.
That’s great in the short term, but now no one is ever gonna build housing again, so in a generation we’re back to a housing shortage.
If you exclusively try to bring down housing costs by attempting to limit demand, you end up making the problem worse. You need to offer more supply.
The demand for housing isn’t being limited though. The demand for investment property has decreased to be replaced with demand for owned housing. You can still sell a new house. People are still buying houses. I agree with others that worse case, we can bolster development at the federal level, but that doesn’t seem like it will be necessary. Additionally, with declining birth rates and an increase in WFH jobs, less housing will be needed, and people are moving to areas where new construction is not as needed as they are moving into previously abandoned/vacant rural areas. So you won’t be seeing new housing developments there so much as rebuilding.
Your paradigm is in no way connected to the reality of how people are moving. New home construction is going up like crazy in the small cities and towns people move into. To expect a small area to absorb a 50% population increase with little new construction is just not realistic.
And to expect renting to just…end? That sounds like a crazy level of privileged bubble. A huge fraction of the population is not and never will be able to afford homeownership, and expecting the government to fund their home purchases would bankrupt any nation.
In my comment I explicitly stated that there is no need to stop new construction. I do not expect any area to absorb anything. I suggested construction will continue and “additionally” that some areas are being revitalized and will have different needs (rebuilding vs new homes). That’s just true.
I’m not expecting renting to just end. I know people who do not want to own any kind of property and prefer short term rentals. It’s not a sensible goal to force people into owning if they don’t want to.
What does it mean to not be able to afford home ownership? Do you mean they not have enough money for housing in the first place, or do you mean they can just rent? If option one, they are considered homeless and the state should provide housing, if option two, then yes, rent to own should be a real thing. First time home buyers loans exist and the project should be expanded. These are not novel proposals that I just made up. People have been suggesting them for quite a while.
Yeah but expanding those programs on the order you’re talking about is absurd levels of money. Not to mention the credit risks…unless you’re suggesting the government act as guarantee, in which case we’ll have a student loan scenario. Home prices will just rise to whatever they were before, plus the government grant.
- the government has absurd levels of money
- it will literally earn the government money long term
- it’s not like it’ll happen overnight
- it’s not a grant it’s a loan. The loan would be for the entire amount. This is already basically in place in a different country.
- prices would not skyrocket because there would be virtually no rental market so if you wanted to sell you’re selling to someone who is going to occupy. Homes will not be investments the way they are currently seen. This will be a way for people currently in a position to only rent to start getting equity so they can have better opportunities in the future. Selling to upgrade will be done because a) you started earning more b) because you had a period with no payments and therefore were able to save c) originally purchased below your means. There will be inflation, but generally no one will be moving into a home for 500k and selling 2-3 years later for a million. There won’t be enough buyers once investors are mostly disincentivized/removed from the market
I think it’s valid to address issues with proposed solutions, especially prior to their implementation. For what it’s worth, their argument is not entirely sound, since most these proposals have built in subsidies for home buyers, but it’s good that they are providing their perspective.
Their “issue” is that they think it doesn’t benefit them personally, and they think everything ought to be about them.
Based I think the same thing should be done to retail stores. If you can’t get people to rent it. Force a sale of the building
Retail stores are dying because of cars. Every time the data shows: parking spaces decrease business, bike lanes and train stations increase it.
Stores are failing because the land they’re on isn’t useful. Cars have poisoned it.
Do you think you provide housing? Here’s a list of common signs:
If someone stole all your tools, you’d kill them, and you don’t think that’s weird.
Unhealthy relationship with caffeine (bonus points for other substances too)
At least one fucked-up bone or joint
There’s some Liquid Nails or silicone caulk stuck in your favorite work shirt
Your hearing isn’t as good as it used to be
Regular porta-shitter use
If two or more of these fit your lifestyle, you may be a provider of housing.
There are literally amendments to the Constitution preventing this from happening have you all lost your mind!
Why do we have to pretend the constitution matters when our enemies don’t?
Ummm… Because our enemies don’t… 🤷
They’re just kids living out a simplistic power fantasy. “If I were king of the world, I’d solve this huge, intractable problem with a simple order”. Like Mao ordering all the sparrows to be killed. Hopefully, once they experience the world a little, they realize that big problems are big because they’re difficult and complicated to solve.
Housing is more complex and the proposed solution may not work, but there are some problems that could be solved by someone with absolute power pretty easily. For example, if we shipped health insurance CEOs off to El Salvadorian labor camps instead of innocent immigrants, people would stop having their claims denied and the concept of a deductible would go the way of the dodo.
Hey, I just rented my property for exactly what the council rates and body corporate expenses are. A $160 pw home. Not even a mark up to cover repairs etc, because capital gain will more than cover that. I did it because I hate what is happening in housing currently, especially for young buyers. Now my new tenant wants to delay moving in for 3 weeks, and not pay any rent during that time. /sigh…what scum I am…
Ban corporations from owning residential properties. Houses shouldn’t be held like stocks or cryptocurrency. Only allow individuals to own a maximum of two residential properties, which must be occupied by the owner at least 5 months out of the year or be surrendered to the government, to be sold to an individual who will live in the house.
In the Netherlands we have wooncorporatie, which are non-profit home rental companies. I think it’s a reasonable model, although the center right government tried to get rid of them for years. (Now we have a coalition of far-right parties in power, and they don’t even have anything like a consistent ideology much less policy so who can know what the future brings?)
Meh, they would redefine vacant and claim “their” property isn’t affected by the law.
Right and that is also a solvable problem.
Housing the homeless is a good idea, but doing it in a random, hap-hazard way is dangerous.
Govt takes over a block of brownstones, and throws a bunch of random people off the street with abuse/violence/psychological issues in them as fast as possible for six months, it’s a recipe for disaster.
You have to be careful about housing people as a government, you become (at least partially) responsible for their actions. Somebody starts cooking meth on an end unit and all of a sudden you have a fire that kills 30 people.
When the govt plans housing they can take flammability, safety, and location into consideration. If you’re just buying up slums to rehab, most of that goes out the window.
They need to invest in group homes for the people you are describing. One well paid housekeeper oversees 5-10 mixable homeless people. By mixable I mean not mixing those with mental issues in with drug users, etc. This is now impossible to hope for in the US with the horrifically cruel “religious conservative” party in control.
I think because of ex post facto, it would take 2 years at least for the housing problem to be solved in this scenario, and I don’t know if handing private assets over to any particular federal government (ahem, US government) would result in the benefit to unhoused people that this comment suggests.
As a current landlord about to extend a lease at exactly the same terms for 3rd year in a row (and I fix everything within 24 hours) - I agree with this too.
It’s ridiculous that my largest store of value is a speculation bubble and a piece of paper with my name on it
I couldn’t disagree more. All the hatred should be directed at individuals/companies that own a bunch of properties. They are specifically in the business of fucking people.
As opposed to the people who merely own one family of serfs?
Wtf are you talking about?
Does it matter to a family that can only rent if they rent from a corporation vs individual?
Spreading out renters is not a solution.
The following math works if the all landlords own the maximum allowed.
If the maximum rentals one could own is 1000, only 1‰ of the population can be landlords. If the maximum rentals one could own is 100, only 1% of the population can be landlords. If the maximum rentals one could own is 10, only 10% of the population can be landlords. If the maximum rentals one could own is 1, only 50% of the population can be landlords. To go back to the beginning, if there is no maximum, only 1 person (0.0001%) of the population can be a landlord and everyone else is a renter (the whole “you will own nothing and be happy” line).
What percent of the population do you want to permit to be landlords? Mind you, not property managers, specifically landlords.
Remember 100% of the population can be a property manager because everyone can manage their own property. But the largest percentage of the population that can be landlords is 50%.
I see that you differentiate from people who happen to have extra space and want to rent it out, that I can understand. But also understand that someone can buy 1 home specifically to fuck over other people.
The problem is that some people want to own other people’s homes. Some people want to own 1000 people’s homes and others just 1 is enough. In either case it is not the number that is the problem but the desire to own other people’s homes for the sole purpose of rent seeking that is the problem.
That is what is meant by the comment about “merely own one family of serfs” is about.
Why make an allowance for property managers? Seems like they see a group of people being exploited, and want to find a way to take a cut of that exploitation.
None of the shit your said counters my original point. Individual renters with a single rental property inherently care about it and it will almost never be their only income. They’re not doing it to squeeze the most money out of it. Most just need rent to cover their own expenses.
Previous comment is still utter fucking nonsense.
You were given a great answer but to put it even more bluntly, just because someone owns one slave it doesn’t make it any better than someone owning a whole plantation of slaves. It’s horrible either way, I don’t care if you have more time to take better care of your slave because it’s your only one; you still own a fucking slave
It wasn’t a great answer. It was incredibly banal and doesn’t take reality into consideration. This idiotic logic can be applied to anything. It doesn’t make any more sense just because you repeat it.
We live in a capitalist country. We’re all slaves by this primitive thinking. You can shift the blame endlessly.
A properly maintained rental that is fairly priced is not unfair to anyone.
The thing I hate most is that all of these clowns will tell you you MUST raise rent every year. They also would likely try and murder you if you even got close to forcing them to pay their employees more every year, or even just other people’s employees. Keep in mind, if you own the property, you are making money with equity no matter if you have tenants or not. So all the rent is gravy but they want to squeeze people to death because they legally have to maintain their own rentals, which the cost of upkeep is REALLY far below the rent paid. Again, $0 in rent is STILL making money off the property.
100% as long as you’re talking about paid off property. That doesn’t really exist since every company that makes this their business model is over-leveraged as fuck and landlords with a single property are very likely to still have a mortgage.
Sell your house and stop participating if you’re concerned about it
This advice is indistinguishable from unsolicited mail wanting to buy houses in cash at above market rate… Presumably so Blackrock can jack it up, restrict supply, and charge way more while doing way less.
Which is exactly what OP post is trying to fix.
I’m not a hero, but I’m doing what’s fair given the system we have. Even I’m saying this is fucked, but it’s the best I can do to affect things for the better.
Landlords are scum, but tenants are fucking disgusting.
Canada instantly bursting in flames
why do you hate me so?
While I’m all for making it harder to just sit on housing, the “more empty homes than homeless” this, while technically true, is very misleading, and I wouldn’t want to try to force unhoused folks into the empty homes without a lot more pruning.
In-demand places don’t typically have much in the way of empty homes, as it doesn’t typically make financial sense not to rent them out. Empty homes in places like this are generally in between tenants or on the market to be sold. Meanwhile, there are places with huge numbers of empty homes, typically because of population drain. The homes sit empty not because someone’s hoarding them, but because people don’t want to move to places like Cairo, Illinois.
The statistic, whilst technically true, doesn’t take into account demographic and population changes. People want to live in places with vibrant economies and lots of job opportunities, and that’s not typically where the huge supply of empty homes is. So we can’t just redistribute our way out of this problem. Building, and especially infill in cities, is absolutely necessary in huge quantities.
People want to live in places with vibrant economies and lots of job opportunities
Homelessness does not exist on this tier of Maslow’s hierarchy.
Having a home is not useful if living it in means you can’t feed yourself. You can find owned, unoccupied housing that’s been on the market over a year. The owners don’t want it, but no buyers want it either. If you freely gave a homeless man one of those houses without any further aid, he’d probably abandon it because he’d have to be within reasonable distance of a city to actually be able to survive.
