>From the amount of homeless and people living in tents and cars, AFAICT the expectation from this society is that people that can't afford rent for whatever reason should just live on the street.
Have you ever been to the US other than the west coast?
There's the occasional tent in a discreet spot in a vacant lot or under a bridge and the occasional car being lived out of at a truck stop. Maybe if you got every person living on the streets (vs a shelter) in a city to pick the same spot you'd have enough to be described as a "camp". It's nothing like you see on the west coast where the homeless are practically everywhere.
https://wjla.com/news/local/shelter-dc-homelessness-pandemic
https://wamu.org/story/20/01/16/dozens-displaced-after-d-c-p...
Been to Florida, Boston, NYC, Washington DC, etc.
Homeless people everywhere.
People living on the streets are not apparently more numerous in NYC, Boston, DC and the litany of other east coast and Midwest cities I have lived in or gone to for business than they are in London, Belfast and Antwerp (my limited first hand experience with western europe). You'll get the occasional tent somewhere, a car being lived out of in a parking lot, but it is by no means rampant. Heck, places that are known for being dumps, Chicago, Gary, Baltimore, Newark, etc. have far, far less homeless people on the streets than Seattle does.
Now, if you has said "Seattle, LA, San Fransisco" I would agree with you. Other than a few wealthy suburbs that actively kick out the homeless you'd have a hard time finding a park without a tent in it. But to frame rampant homelessness as a US problem or a liberal cities problem when it is almost purely a west coast problem is pure falsehood.
Just stop lying!
A group of 5 homeless people in each of the cities i've lived there would have been a huge group.
I've continuously encountered groups of 20-50 homeless people living in Boston, NYC, Miami, etc.
That's an order of magnitude more than what I consider "normal".
The west coast is another order of magnitude higher, with groups of 100s of homeless people around seattle, san francisco, san diego, LA, etc.
But that not makes the situation in the east coast cities i've visited "good". I consider the situation in the east coast "horrible", and in the west coast "war-zone like", when compared with the cities where I've lived in europe (madrid, barcelona, milan, munich, stuttgart, etc.).
>I've continuously encountered groups of 20-50 homeless people living in Boston, NYC, Miami, etc.
This just just not true.
About the only way to get 5+ homeless people in one spot in any of those cities is to do something that specifically encourages them to show up, like a church giving out free lunches on a Sunday.
I can't speak to Miami but I've commuted into (like train and walking, not just the highway) NYC and Boston, the latter more recently, and the most I've ever encountered with any regularity is groups of two (usually a pair of dudes who seem to look after each other's stuff). There are some panhandling points on the subways but any one point won't be occupied every day. The density of homeless is low enough that doesn't happen.
Your description of Germany fits with my observation of NYC, Boston, Newark, New Haven, Baltimore, basically the Boston-DC corridor.
Is exactly the implication of market-based housing.
I was hoping that my explanation would help to illustrate how facilitating eviction won't help with rising homelessness. How it alone can actually foster the growth of homelessness. "Supply" created by evicting tenants is only supply for the people that can afford the new price.
The government won't build you a home, at least not the kind you'd want to live in.
The government needs to get out of the way of people trying to build homes, and it needs to protect the people that are currently housed.
Eviction enforcement is orthogonal to these concerns.
My understanding is that many do not consider homless shelters a dignifying place to live in: no private space, no private room, etc.
They'd rather live in their care or their tent where they have some "me" space, than in a shelter.
In Germany, for example, the government would pay for your rent before letting you sleep on the street, car, or tent. They don't consider shelters a dignifying place to live either, and having a sane place to live is pretty much a pre-requisite for being able to turn your life around.
Berlin models homelessness efforts on US program: https://www.german-times.com/with-the-us-as-a-role-model-ber...
Berlin opens hostel for homeless (NOT "me" space): https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/berlin-hostel-help...
Half a decade ago, at least where I was there wasn't many homeless there, but the rents in Berlin have exploded since, so the situation might have changed there.
But well over half of homeless people are addicts, and a lot of these folks will bail out of much nicer arrangements simply because they're not allowed to drink or do drugs.
Does that mean addicts should live in misery?
Addiction is a disease, it requires resources to treat.
I know there are folks who say out loud that addicts "deserve" their fate, and by that they mean society has a prerogative to ignore or punish them.
I'm certainly not one of those, and I appreciate that you're not either, but I also wouldn't say that society is obligated to expend unlimited resources to accommodate people that refuse to take care of themselves.
1. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-housing-homeless-cheaper-socie...
I've seen a lot of this first hand. I can see you have strong opinions, but I would encourage you to actually learn a bit about it, maybe volunteer at a shelter or with a treatment and placement organization.
1. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/09/418546/study-finds-permane...
In your apparent lack of experience, you're strawmanning any argument that doesn't align with your opinions.
And you also apparently forgot to read the study you cited, because it supports exactly what I've been saying: fourteen percent of their participants could not be kept in their intensive housing+treatment program. Fourteen percent is a hell of a lot better than the usual two-thirds, but that's still a whole lot of people that we don't know how to help, no matter how many resources we throw at them. I know people just like that, even if you refuse to acknowledge their existence, and I don't pretend to have the answers. It's a hard, hard problem.
How about this: since you seem to have this figured out, write up your proposal for a permanent, humane solution for that fourteen percent. I'm sure the folks who've spent careers trying to figure it out would love to know what you think they're doing wrong. Go get em tiger!
You can and should avoid personal attacks and assumptions about my experience. You have failed to provide evidence to support your ancedotes.
>I know people just like that, even if you refuse to acknowledge their existence, and I don't pretend to have the answers.
I am not refusing to acknowledge the existence of that cohort. You are moving the goalposts: saying that if we can not find a solution for those people specifically, then we can not address the structural deficiencies that lead to the movement of more people into homelessness. The data shows "the streets (or prison)" is not "the endgame" for the 86% that actually benefit from supportive housing.
There is also a shortage, in some areas, of low income housing. I am not sure what it is like in Germany but developers don't want to create low income housing since it tends to be treated poorly and increases crime in the area. How does Germany deal with that or are the German homeless better stewards of the place they live?
It does not have to be an special "low income housing".
Also, in the US it is my understanding you don't have to go to low income housing, but non low income housing can reject you. Since people receiving money for housing do not tend to treat the housing well most landlords reject them. Why rent to somebody who is at an increased likelihood of damaging your place and won't have enough money to cover the damage?
In Germany the government gives you the money, and you to the landlord. The landlord doesn't need to know where you got the money.
Having said that, many landlords will reject based on looks, which can be tough.
> Wait so I could go to Germany, find an apartment that costs €10000 a month and the government would pay for it? Surely there is some kind of limit?
The government collects the rent prices of the last 4 years on each area, and uses them to create tables per region / city, of the upper limits.
Depending on the city, that might allow you to live downtown, or force you into the suburbs.
You can see one of these tables, e.g., for Munich, here: https://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/Stadtverwaltung/Sozialrefera...
There are single rooms < 50m2 for less than 680 EUR/month in munich. Not downtown, but not too far in the suburbs either. The prices there look ok for somebody without any assets nor income. Its not going to be luxurious, but it won't be crappy either. A university student might be living in worse conditions, which isn't bad for someone without income nor assets.
Refugees were initially moved into refugee camps, so you didn't see them in cities, and then they were and still are being slowly integrated.
Refugee camps are no place to for people to live, but if you are escaping from a war zone, they are better than staying in the war zone.
Germany does provide (1) housing and (2) a living way to unemployed inhabitants without unemployment benefits, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept#Hartz_IV
Requesting it isn't hard. I know many highly educated people that suddenly had no income or were evicted, e.g., due to loosing all "student benefits" right the same day they finished university, including housing, being evicted a couple of days later. They got Hartz IV benefits in a matter of hours, which paid for an apartment and gave them 400 EUR or so per month for food and basic stuff (you can live an ok-ish life with that if housing is covered).
But most homeless I saw in the streets in Germany, which you can actually just go and talk to, didn't want to receive any help from the state, had psychological problems, didn't want to receive medical attention, etc.
Due to how the German system for this works, it is actually super hard to help these people. Still, in a sense, the people that are homeless in Germany, is because at least in some way, they want to. Since not being homeless - with the exception of refugees - is as easy as going by an office, signing a sheet of paper, and the government pays for your rent, heating, water, electricity, internet, clothes, work training, healthcare and on top gives you 400 EUR that you can spend however you want (food, or just booze, etc.).
For the refugees... Germany is tight on housing, and new developments are slow, so being 1 million houses short (for 1% of the population), and then taking 1 million refugees on top, their access to housing is improving very slowly. I'd say they are free to apply for asylum somewhere else, but pretty much everywhere else the conditions are much worse for them.
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For context, relative to Germany's population, the 1 million of refugees Germany took per capita would be similar to the US taking 4-5 million refugees, in a very short period of time. IIRC, the US took less than 20k refugees from a war-zone they are very responsible for. At least they are consistent: they don't care about their homeless, and they don't care about the homeless they create everywhere else in the world. Then they are surprised when the homeless that end up growing up in ISIS camps end up flying planes into their skyscrapers.
Homeless people don't "live" in shelters, they temporarily occupy them. Every morning the shelter kicks out the people that slept there and every evening people must queue to re-enter the shelter. Night-to-night, no one is guaranteed a bed.
This is not an "option" that enables meaningful participation in our economy and society nor does it facilitate the health and growth that is necessary for escaping poverty.
For example, it appears California is maintaining around 20% capacity utilization in shelters statewide on average.
Talk to the workers, and they'll tell you the main struggle is not running out of space, but getting homeless people in the door, because as you point out, shelter life sucks. You're absolutely right, one doesn't "live" in a shelter in any meaningful sense. They're not a permanent solution, and hardly even a temporary one.
Have you been to the US?
From the amount of homeless and people living in tents and cars, AFAICT the expectation from this society is that people that can't afford rent for whatever reason should just live on the street.
The poor do not deserve a roof.
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Kind of sarcasm, but kind of true.