Among all domestic political issues, I think homelessness has one of the highest ratios of (a) the severity of the problem to (b) the attention it receives.
My basic philosophy is that there should never be more homelessness in a wealthy, industrialized nation than there is among typical hunter-gatherer societies (where, I believe, there is essentially none).
Private property is awesome, and in combination with capitalism, it has done unmistakable good in lifting whole societies out of poverty and drastically increasing overall standards of living.
But our system of private property, where I can buy more land than I'll ever personally use and then exclude anyone else from building shelter on it, is not a divine economic principle handed down by God. It's just a set of rules that we've collectively (but not unanimously) come up with in order to try to improve our collective lot. And I think part of the trade-off should be that when we adopt a system that makes people on the whole much better off, economically, than we'd ever have been as hunter-gatherers, we should use a fraction of the overall gains to make sure that the least fortunate among us are no worse off than they'd have been as hunter-gatherers.
That means making sure that everyone is able to procure food, clothing, and shelter.
In any case, I don't mean for this OP to be any kind of manifesto. I just came across an article that I thought was worth sharing and realized that we don't have a general homelessness thread to put it in, so I'm creating one.
It's hard to know exactly what to do about the homelessness problem, but as pragmatists, our basic answer should be: whatever works. Here is the article I wanted to share, which suggests that Helsinki's approach is worth closer inspection:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle-helsinkis-radical-solution-to-homelessness
My basic philosophy is that there should never be more homelessness in a wealthy, industrialized nation than there is among typical hunter-gatherer societies (where, I believe, there is essentially none).
Private property is awesome, and in combination with capitalism, it has done unmistakable good in lifting whole societies out of poverty and drastically increasing overall standards of living.
But our system of private property, where I can buy more land than I'll ever personally use and then exclude anyone else from building shelter on it, is not a divine economic principle handed down by God. It's just a set of rules that we've collectively (but not unanimously) come up with in order to try to improve our collective lot. And I think part of the trade-off should be that when we adopt a system that makes people on the whole much better off, economically, than we'd ever have been as hunter-gatherers, we should use a fraction of the overall gains to make sure that the least fortunate among us are no worse off than they'd have been as hunter-gatherers.
That means making sure that everyone is able to procure food, clothing, and shelter.
In any case, I don't mean for this OP to be any kind of manifesto. I just came across an article that I thought was worth sharing and realized that we don't have a general homelessness thread to put it in, so I'm creating one.
It's hard to know exactly what to do about the homelessness problem, but as pragmatists, our basic answer should be: whatever works. Here is the article I wanted to share, which suggests that Helsinki's approach is worth closer inspection:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle-helsinkis-radical-solution-to-homelessness
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