My biggest problem with this, is that as it stands right now, the majority of the homeless have mental health issues where they don’t understand what’s going on 99% of the time. Your plan offers nothing in the way of addressing their issues.
This is your personal bias and is not reflected in the literature. The truth is that housing first, simply giving people housing, is the proven most effective way to help homeless people, even those with serious drug and mental health issues! It turns out that living on the street makes it damned near impossible to make any improvements in your drug addiction or mental healthcare struggles.
Also, often people confuse cause and effect. Imagine you yourself had to sleep on the sidewalk every night. Imagine you got stuck there, repeatedly tried to pull yourself out, but couldn’t. People aren’t just born homeless. They become homeless when the market cost of housing exceeds the market value of their labor. That’s literally all that is required. Tens of millions of working poor exist on the verge of homelessness. And if you lose your job, become homeless, and get another job, you’re just right back in that state of precarity. It’s very easy for people to just become stuck in homelessness.
So again, imagine you were in such a situation. How many times being thrown out on thrown out on the street, putting yourself back together, getting another job, losing it, and being thrown back on the street, are you going to go through before you say…“fuck it, I’m just going to get high all day!” It’s no coincidence that the drugs homeless people abuse the most are those that allow them to escape their present reality. They’re taking drugs that numb the pain, not drugs that bring hyperawareness. Cheap opioids numb both physical and emotional pain. Most of the time, people aren’t homeless because they do drugs, they do drugs because they are homeless. Do not confuse cause and effect.
My second problem is, if these people are jobless and homeless, but they still get all their basic needs met…what’s to stop me, someone who’s living outside of my means but still not making much money at all from just quitting my job and having free rent and all day free rather than 99% of my day spoken for and still losing money?
That’s why you provide basic housing as a social right. I think anyone who needs it should be able to be housed in a setting that is roughly equivalent in quality to a basic college dorm. You get a space to sleep, store a few things, access to communal bathing and cooking facilities, etc. If you’re single, you live with a roommate.
Why would you bother working instead of living like that? Do YOU want to live the dorm life your entire life? Do YOU want to have that little space and privacy your whole life? If you don’t want to live that way forever, then don’t judge your fellow man so harshly and think they are less than you. If you don’t want to live like that, most others likely don’t want to either.
That is the core idea. You provide basic housing, just basic shelter that provides the minimum facilities for someone to be clean, safe, and have a modicum of self-worth. You provide enough to keep people safe and secure, but not so much that people actually want to stay there indefinitely.
Sure, if you’re an ascetic-monk type that has renounced all worldly goods and wants to literally spend your whole life in prayer or meditation, maybe you would be content living that lifestyle forever. But so few people actually want to live that way, that we need not concern ourselves with it.
This is your personal bias and is not reflected in the literature. The truth is that housing first, simply giving people housing, is the proven most effective way to help homeless people, even those with serious drug and mental health issues! It turns out that living on the street makes it damned near impossible to make any improvements in your drug addiction or mental healthcare struggles.
Also, often people confuse cause and effect. Imagine you yourself had to sleep on the sidewalk every night. Imagine you got stuck there, repeatedly tried to pull yourself out, but couldn’t. People aren’t just born homeless. They become homeless when the market cost of housing exceeds the market value of their labor. That’s literally all that is required. Tens of millions of working poor exist on the verge of homelessness. And if you lose your job, become homeless, and get another job, you’re just right back in that state of precarity. It’s very easy for people to just become stuck in homelessness.
So again, imagine you were in such a situation. How many times being thrown out on thrown out on the street, putting yourself back together, getting another job, losing it, and being thrown back on the street, are you going to go through before you say…“fuck it, I’m just going to get high all day!” It’s no coincidence that the drugs homeless people abuse the most are those that allow them to escape their present reality. They’re taking drugs that numb the pain, not drugs that bring hyperawareness. Cheap opioids numb both physical and emotional pain. Most of the time, people aren’t homeless because they do drugs, they do drugs because they are homeless. Do not confuse cause and effect.
That’s why you provide basic housing as a social right. I think anyone who needs it should be able to be housed in a setting that is roughly equivalent in quality to a basic college dorm. You get a space to sleep, store a few things, access to communal bathing and cooking facilities, etc. If you’re single, you live with a roommate.
Why would you bother working instead of living like that? Do YOU want to live the dorm life your entire life? Do YOU want to have that little space and privacy your whole life? If you don’t want to live that way forever, then don’t judge your fellow man so harshly and think they are less than you. If you don’t want to live like that, most others likely don’t want to either.
That is the core idea. You provide basic housing, just basic shelter that provides the minimum facilities for someone to be clean, safe, and have a modicum of self-worth. You provide enough to keep people safe and secure, but not so much that people actually want to stay there indefinitely.
Sure, if you’re an ascetic-monk type that has renounced all worldly goods and wants to literally spend your whole life in prayer or meditation, maybe you would be content living that lifestyle forever. But so few people actually want to live that way, that we need not concern ourselves with it.