What are we going to do about the homeless?

Raising rent has never been illegal, except for a few limited "rent controlled" dwellings in large cities like NYC. But do you know what the answer is if you don't like what your rent is? You move. I've done it several times in my life. You also don't have to be one of "them" to buy a house, I most certainly am not, and I have owned a number of houses. The one I'm in now I got smart about, and instead of trying to get another McMansion (been there, done that, had rooms that I don't think a single person set foot in for years), we bought a small house that was a definite fixer-upper, got lucky to get it on a mortgage foreclosure sale, and through a combination of sweat equity (much of it my wife's, as I became disabled only a year and a half after we bought the place), some paint here, new flooring, we've got a new roof going on this week, and a bit of good timing, it's increased in value about 350% since we bought it in 2016.

What you don't realize though is that it's not landlords who set the rent price, it's the tenants. When we moved from one apartment to another some years back, we told the management straight up it was because we could get pretty much an identical property from an apartment complex down the street (ironically, at the time they were owned by the same company), and they refused to match it. Why? Because they had a list of people waiting to pay the rate I was unwilling to pay. On the flip side, if they were losing tenants left and right for price reasons and didn't have someone waiting in the wings to pay their price, they would have had no choice but to lower them.

Your statements remind me a lot of some folks near me who are protesting rent prices and demanding that the government "do something" as if they just have a birthright to live in the exact zip code they would like to. And sure enough, when I researched their "organizations" (which likely amounted to no more than 10 or so actual members), on their websites they are open and unapologetic socialists. But what they, and you also, don't seem to understand is that such living arrangements are not a birthright and happen only if you can, and are willing to pay for them. Which means having a job, and not one that high school students do after school for spending money.

And when it comes down to discussing places to live, sometimes you have to vote with your money and move, maybe even to another city somewhere far away.

By the way, on your prior suggestion that we put homeless folks into rich people's 2nd homes, who is going to continue paying the $5k/month mortgage on it?

 

I know what we should do! ask the Utopia of California! American Democrat Politicians were ganna teach the rest of Americans how beautiful Socialism can be. Just look at all of the homeless that live in California, that pee and poop out in public for anyone to see them doing so, and how many millions of dollars each year, does it take to clean it up?

People in hazardous suits I believe get paid 80 thousand dollars per person.
And in California, they keep spending more and more money on places for people to use illegal drugs.

Or, they could put all of that money , towards more homeless shelters, and things for the homeless, but they won't because they're corrupt Democrat Politicians.

 

It that works, then we'd not have this thread.

 

But we damn well ought to move away from the current green agenda which is antithetical to human life and other than killing a bunch of human beings won't do **** for the environment.

 

Most of those are self inflicted wounds by doing stupid sh*t like dropping out of high school or having a bunch of kids and/or felonies by the time they hit 20.

 

Well, for starters, I would GREATLY expand public mental health care services. I would GREATLY expand money for public shelters. I would GREATLY expand the money for job training programs.

And thats just a small start.

 

Homeless? What homeless? Democratic run big cities can't possibly have homeless because they know how to fix income inequality and not have any homeless. You must be mistaken.

 

Restraining capitalism with reasonable and fair rules is not socialism.

As Mr. Justice Brandeis noted a century ago, We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.

 

Income is an important measure. We use that measure for food, too.

Also, remember that "expensive" cities want diversity, including in income. One has to recognize that there are numerous jobs in cities where the compensation is really not enough to live there. That's why the push on living wage.

 

I don't doubt that. That's where education, guidance and compassion are needed. Their circumstances are more likely the product of a messed-up life since birth.

 

Mo money, mo money, mo money!!! That'll solve the problem.

Except we've spent countless trillions of dollars trying to "solve the problem" of poverty and still have roughly the same amount (per capita) of people in poverty. Not only is it an unsolvable problem, nobody is truly impoverished in the US. When you've got a roof over your head, a car, a flat screen panel TV, the latest video game system, and a new phone every few years, you're not poor. Especially if you throw the price of smoking cigarettes on top of that. Also, if you're fat, you're not poor. Being fat used to be seen as a sign of prosperity.

 

Here’s What Life Looks Like in a Country That’s Run Out of Fuel.

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"Jason Anthony has been in a two-kilometre fuel queue for two days now. In the capital city of Colombo, in the crisis-hit South Asian nation of Sri Lanka, the 35-year-old sleeps in his tuktuk when he’s exhausted, or sits on the pavement with other drivers who have been there for several days too. When the fuel station closes for the day, he walks several kilometres back home, only to return the next day to queue up.

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In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong.

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They jumped on the "Green" bandwagon and now they are facing starving.

"Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic."

"The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange."

Sri Lanka facing imminent threat of starvation

 

In the First World, income should never be the criteria. The individual's history should be the guide, always.

It doesn't matter what the expensive city 'wants'. If you can't afford to live there, you don't live there. If you insist, then it's on you personally to find a way to make it work. Not the Govt's problem, since it's your freely made choice.

 

None of which will make a difference. We've been throwing money at 'welfare' for decades, and the problems are increasing. It doesn't matter how many shelters you build, not one in a hundred who use them, will use them for their intended purpose (as a platform for their own self-improvement). They become half empty buildings, improving nothing for anyone. There are already plenty of mental health services available to the homeless .. they don't want them. Job training programs are readily available for the destitute, but again, the destitute don't want them.

You either accept that homelessness is largely a choice (no matter what they might tell you), and therefore none of your business .. or you mandate commital to an institution.

 

You missed the point on that.

Since "expensive cities" need certain services, those cities have to take action to be sure that the service providers can live within access to those jobs in the city.

So, cities do have to care a LOT about low income residents.

Thus, they work on affordable housing, set minimum wage limits, and take other actions to help ensure they have access to the labor they want.

 

People can commute, just like low income city workers do in many countries (including mine).

If a given individual can't stand the thought of commuting .. again, that's on them. It's a freely made choice.

 

Just my personal observations, but I predict the Left, as a whole, is too dumb and stupid to be able to actually solve the homelessness problem.
I say this because of all their idiotic ideas for solutions so far that either have no chance of solving even a quarter of the problem, or are so impractically expensive that they could never be used to solve all the problem. The Left just seems to be very bad with cost-effectiveness.

Oh, and besides that, the Left just doesn't care enough about the homeless to actually really solve the problem. It's just not a very high priority. (There aren't exactly much votes to be gotten from the homeless for one thing)

 

Commuting IS one of the options being used. But, the cost of commuting plus the cost of living in further outlying areas is also expensive.

 

No it isn't, because the further you travel from the inner city, the cheaper the housing. And the cost of public transport is less than running a car. Commuting is always a more affordable option for those on lower incomes. Everyone here does it, if they have a low paid job in the city.

 

the last Admin should have addressed this issue already, but agree, Biden should clean up this mess after Trump

 

give them a bus ticket to Texas or Florida

 

Well, that's just not the way it's working.

I don't know where you are. Maybe where you are there is good public transit for far enough away from large cities.

In the US, we don't particularly believe in public transit in the way that a lot of first world countries do.

 

1) Why? If we can do it, Americans can too. What's stopping them?

2) In the First World, but not America. Most of our big cities have frequent trains running from around 100km out of the centre. Many people commute for up to two hours each way. That's an additional four hours on your working day. We may not love doing it, but we don't think of it as some outrageous impost. We accept it's the price we pay if we want to work in a big city.

3) Why not?

 

Mostly, it's just politics and societal views that slow public transit.

Yes, I've been around Europe/UK.

But, that's not the way America is built, and Republicans/conservatives are especially opposed to public transit spending.

I suspect good public transit would reduce homelessness in our larger cities - not a full solution, but I do not believe there is one solution. The problem has too many facets to be solved by some single solution.

 

Reduce the size, cost, and scope of government across the board by 2/3.

Bring back lower middle class jobs that fled to Mexico, South America, and China.

Stop importing anything from Mexico until their corrupt government deals with our mutual border.

Kill most of the anti-energy, anti-freedom environmental laws and make energy cheap and plentiful again.

Remove the anti-America, anti-freedom curriculum from our schools, and fire every leftist involved in implementing that destructive agenda.

Repeal the 17th Amendment.

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That would be a good start.