Homelessness was on the rise even before the pandemic

No, I think it's a problem for the future - for young people and those not yet born who might end up homeless if we don't address the root cause.

 

What do you actually mean when you say some people don't see it as a problem? What are they saying, exactly?

 

Hedonism and its number one fan - the welfare state.

 

Which probably explains why you do everything in your power to evade, deny, and obscure the root cause: the exorbitant, increasing, and unsustainable subsidization of idle landowning at the expense of the landless.

 

Funny, I remember 50 years ago we had hedonism and the welfare state, but no homelessness. Such a mystery. To you, that is.

 

It's more that they see it as a moral problem peculiar to the homeless, whose condition is claimed merely to demonstrate their lack of the virtues requisite to obtaining a home.

 

No, it's a moral problem of those behind the State. The people who want a massive permanent underclass.

 

Oh yeah .. because the late 60's was SO hedonistic compared to today. And welfare was soooo widespread.

But the 60's were in a sense, the beginning of the problem. The 50's had to go for other reasons (racism and sexism), but in regards to personal social responsibility, it was far superior to what came after the 60's.

 

So you mean the privileged. Now you're talking.

 

50ya was 1971. The oldest boomers were turning 25. Welfare and hedonism were both commonplace. And as a reasonably informed highschool student, I had never seen a homeless person. Such a mystery.

To you, that is.

 

Are you aware that there is a well financed movement wanting to eradicate private property entirely for individuals, with all property in the hands of some kind of oligarchy? When you add that group to the other group (the big money behind Western Democratic states), who want a large permanent underclass, you will get a double whopper oligarchy of technical aristocrats, and your descendants will never EVER have even a hint of the personal power that you not only take for granted, but actually disparage. They will never enjoy reward for effort, or have any say in the direction their lives take. They will be the very last word in cogs-in-the-wheel.

 

Whatever they are, they want you and I as helpless and dependent as possible. They deliberately created the conditions which enable dissolution, for that reason.

It seems you want to help them to that end.

 

Of course you didn't see any homeless people. Back then families took better care of their own, people were not encouraged to think they could just drop out, and local mental institutions existed in every town and city. These are three ACTS OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY, now lost.

 

Like "The homeless problem is not that bad", or "No one really becomes homeless against their will if they put some decent effort into it". Or "99 percent of them are drug addicts or severely mentally ill, or just very lazy". "Homelessness is a choice", "If you work hard, you'll never have to worry about ending up homeless".

 

The latter two observations are entirely correct, so the question must be asked - why do YOU have a problem with the facts?

You will find that all reputable stats on First World homelessness show that 90%+ are addicts, and most of those remaining are mentally ill (without addiction). That leaves less than 1% who are neither mentally ill nor addicts. They're incredibly rare. So rare that there is absolutely no point even including them in any conversation on homelessness. Besides, they're almost always the ones who don't stay homeless for long. All consideration of homelessness must apply to the vast majority, because it's they who will find it much harder to move on, and because the sheer weight of numbers demands it.

If you refuse to address the addiction, it's because you have no real interest in homelessness. You're interested only in appearing to be interested. It can't be anything else, when you insist on pretending the cause isn't what it is.

 

You pretty much just proved my point.

 

I don't think you can't blame all of this on addiction, not in all cases. You know, there used to be a time when drug addicts or alcoholics, even if they had a severe problem, were still able to eek by and manage not to be homeless (though they might have lived in poverty).
But as the cost of housing in many regions became higher and higher, it gets harder and harder, and those who aren't exactly "perfect" are not able to keep treading water, and they go under.

When you see the amount of homeless increasing, that kind of tells you that groups of people who wouldn't have been homeless before, under different economic circumstances a few decades ago, they would be homeless now.

 

Evidence for such a change in familial care? Of course not.

Wrong: "Tune in, turn on, drop out." Remember?

And more importantly, people who needed them had access to them at little or no cost to them or their families.

You are just wrong on the first two, and the third is a matter of public policy, not individual choice by the homeless or their families.

 

"Dissolution"? No. They are not interested in dissolution; that is why they deliberately created the conditions that indissolubly cement their privilege.

It seems you want to help them to that end.

 

You contradict yourself. The oligarchy in question consists entirely of astronomically propertied private individuals.

For the treadmill that powers the escalator the privileged ride up at their leisure.

ROTFL!!! You mean the "technical aristocrats" who live in their cars because their engineer salaries won't pay for a vacant SFD building lot in Silicon Valley?

I have proved to you that people's liberty rights have been forcibly stripped from them and given to the privileged as their private property. You are the one who disparages the right to liberty, and disingenuously claims that having to pay the privileged full market value for permission to exercise it merely proves it is intact!

And your relentless opposition to liberty, justice, and truth, and disingenuous servitude to privilege, will have helped bring that outcome about.

 

This is in the Economics section.
In this thread, I was trying to focus on the economic factors that have lead to an increase in homelessness.

Yes, there are many other factors that lead to homelessness (and economics might not even be the biggest one) but you are not going to see an increase in homelessness over a 10 or 20-year period without there being some outside extraneous factor (like economics) causing it.

It's an indicator that something in the economy has changed.

 

Economies are ALWAYS changing. The reason there are seven billion humans today, is because we've always been able to adapt to those changes. We have yet been able to stop change because SOME people don't want to adapt.

 

And I explained them to you.

The subsidy to idle landowning has increased, as proved, repeat, PROVED by the astronomical increase in the value of land. Higher subsidies to idle landowning make housing unaffordable by making it uneconomic to build low-cost accommodation: someone who pays $300K for a vacant building lot is not going to be willing to live in a house that can be built there for $100K, while someone who only pays $30K for the lot will. Simple. You have merely decided not to know such facts, because you have already realized that they prove your beliefs are false and evil.

 

Do we want to talk about why those increases have happened?
Those increases will not happen unless there is a change in supply relative to demand. Something else in the economic market must have changed to cause those increases.

I would speculate rapid population increase, but that may be a subject of discussion for another time (if you don't want to talk about it).

 

It's complicated. But one reason is the economy's increasingly debilitating addiction to debt. We have to increase the subsidy to landowning in order to stop all the mortgage debt from blowing up.

Demand for land is based on nothing but the expected net after-tax subsidy.

Increased population, reduced property tax rates, advancing technology, capital accumulation, lack of profitable productive outlets for investment, etc.

Population increase has actually slowed.