Note also that Utah, a very conservative state, solves homelessness in exactly this way.
It just might be that the housing would not be provided by funneling huge amounts of tax dollars to the rentier class, and might involve constructing more houses, and therefore would be opposed by the left.
In ten years, incidence of chronic homelessness in Utah went from 1,932 to 178.
Solving 91% of homelessness is a fantastic achievement, even if the remaining 9% needs further work.
The reduction was closer to 60%, and in the past few years, they've stopped investing in the program. It's been a good thing, but without ongoing effort and investment it will regress back to the mean.
See also the book “SanFranSicko” by Michael Schellenberger.
Additionally, the two party system has effectively declawed the vox populi and made the barriers to change very, very large.
This means that until we're out of boomers (and a significant portion of Gen xers) the isn't going to be a possibility of the sort of critical mass necessary to make the systemic changes we need to reconnect the will of the people with the behavior of the government / media / business machine.
Although, if we make it that far, I'm sure the well organized entrenched upper class will have a whole new set of tricks to try. It's very difficult to properly organize against them.
It's a variant of a straw man that right wing people sometimes use. Which makes sense given that OP is forming their perceptions of the left from a book subtitled "How Progressives Destroy Cities".
(Conservative areas are generally both socially, and economically conservative. I know someone will mention Utah's housing first program, and I'll cut them off at the pass, by pointing out that subsequent governments have been severely under investing in it.)
That's trivial; prison. (Ignoring the part where prisons now charge prisoners rent...)
Finding a solution everybody can agree on is much harder than finding a solution only one side or the other can agree with.
This comment proves you don't know your adversary, which is a dangerous situation to be in.
Historical and contemporary conservative approaches to homelessness tend to fixate on criminalization and enforcement: more cops to break up camps, more pretenses to jail homeless persons, more opportunities for the prison-industrial complex to get its cheap labor. "Jail the beggars, jail the addicts, jail the crazies." Today, a century ago, a millennium ago... the dynamics between the rich and poor are basically unchanged; all that's changed, at most, is how the rich get selected.
Utah is also heavily Mormon, which complicates things. Mormons have a lot of beliefs that sound fairly socialist when you describe them in practice, except that they believe the church should be the administrator of those policies.
Mormons also heavily oppose abortion, which makes them a nearly single-issue voting bloc, making Utah deep red in a purely partisan sense.
If somehow abortion were a non-issue - like, overnight, everyone somehow magically forgot abortion even existed - it's not hard to imagine Mormons being one of the least conservative Christian denominations.
(Yes, I'm aware that other Christians don't consider the LDS to be Christians, but that's beside the point)
A lot of hardline religious sects superficially look like socialism if you only examine their in-groups and entirely ignore their out-groups. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is no exception.
You're getting downvoted, but you're broadly correct. There's a lot of research showing how more homogeneously white populations are more likely to support leftist or socialist policies (policies, not affiliation) than people of the same demographics who live in more heterogeneous places.
The key according to this article is the cost of housing, not implied racism.
https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2021/12/being-poor-alone-do...
The majority of effectively homeless in the US are working people. This means people who dont own or rent any kind of housing. They crash in other people's places, frequently going homeless for periods. This includes working families. Their size is estimated in millions.
The chronic homeless are people who dont even have any place to crash from time to time. People refer to these people as 'the homeless', without knowing that a lot of the above category also enters this category frequently over any given year. The chronic homeless category also includes working people due to the skyrocketing housing costs, especially in major metropolises like NY, SF etc. This segment's size is estimated in a range in between 500,000 to 3 million, depending on whose research and criteria you take.
Drug addicts are also in this category, and the existing economic establishment prefers to identify the homeless with them in order to thwart any reform that could cause an increase in their taxes or disturb the real estate sector.
...
So that's right - the problem is ideological. But maybe even before that, its economical - those who hoard the wealth dont want anyone to disturb them and their ever-increasing hoards of wealth with any pesky taxes...
People who have that safety net can spend a few weeks or months crashing on couches until they get their housing situation sorted out. People who, for whatever reason, don't, are the ones trying to hold a job while living out of a car, and one bad encounter with the police can cause them to lose that job.
And once you fall into the same strata as the chronic homeless, it is almost impossible to crawl out of it.
If you want to reduce the number of chronic homeless give years from now, we need services for the temporary homeless, today. If you're getting kicked out of your apartment next Tuesday, and have nobody you can lean on, what you need is four walls and a roof so that you don't land on the street.
Neither section 8 housing, nor the current shelter system supply that. Especially if you're a man, or are queer, or, or, or...
I try to fight my internal NIMBYism, but clutter horde and verbal assaults are where I draw the line.
From the New York Times article on my hometown Houston trying to end homelessness with a housing first policy:
> But housing first involves a different logic: When you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
The last paragraph is pretty clear on the real difficulty:
>The major obstacles to resolving homelessness remain ideological. It is politically hard to sell the idea that people who take drugs or are disruptive should get free housing – even when the evidence shows that is actually what works.