Fundamentally, the homelessness problem is a shortage of homes. If there are more people than there are homes, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, someone is going to be without one.
We can argue about why there is a mismatch between the population and homes, and I think there are probably many reasons going into it, but any solution focused on the people rather than the homes isn’t likely to solve anything. The people aren’t the problem.
If you think giving the homeless money will solve this, I’ll ask this: what housing do you expect them to rent?
There is not a shortage of homes. This is a contrived fallacy created by the YIMBY movement and real estate lobby. The truth is we have too many people who feel like they are entitled to live wherever they want for whatever price they can afford. I would love to live on the beach in Hawaii, but I can't afford it. I could claim that there is a shortage of homes on the beach in Hawaii, but thats not an accurate description of what is actually the root cause of the grievance here.
This doesn’t pass the smell test to me. That makes sense if homelessness was only a problem in a few places. It’s not. It’s happening everywhere. Eugene and Portland may be worse than average but I promise you it’s all over the place.
Where do you propose sending these homeless that they can suddenly have available homes?
Property lines are whats causing this issue, we are no longer in an era where you can keep pushing undesirables further west.
To answer your question, there are more houses than homeless. But they are all in the Midwest/East. However, these places are still too expensive for people who have nothing.
0
u/Randvek Aug 04 '22
I don’t think that it would.
Fundamentally, the homelessness problem is a shortage of homes. If there are more people than there are homes, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, someone is going to be without one.
We can argue about why there is a mismatch between the population and homes, and I think there are probably many reasons going into it, but any solution focused on the people rather than the homes isn’t likely to solve anything. The people aren’t the problem.
If you think giving the homeless money will solve this, I’ll ask this: what housing do you expect them to rent?