The problem of homelessness isn't due to a lack of money. The problem is people don't want housing for the homeless (or any housing at all, usually) built near them. When there's a shortage of housing, there's gonna be homeless people, it's basic logic.

The amount of money required to fix the housing shortage is negligible for a country as rich as the US. But money isn't the problem here, politics is. And no amount of money can fix that.

US homeowners made a decision to use their homes as their primary or secondary investment vehicles so they have little interest in allowing any new construction that could be viewed as lowering their property values.

There’s also a good bit of plain old racism involved but people are in denial about it and insist they’re implying something else.

For example, in a nearby community they were proposing some “starter townhomes” priced at $295K (median home price in the area is 350K). These were not rentals, low income, section 8a - they were new construction townhomes on the lower end of the pricing spectrum. People FREAKED out, and suggested they’d be bought up by gangs and junkies and all sorts of ne’er-do-wells and the project was killed. Someone stood up at a zoning meeting and said “Do you really want someone who lives in one of these as your neighbor? Do you want their kids going to our schools? I sure don’t!” To thunderous applause.

I personally can’t wrap my head around the logic. It’s not like these existing homeowners are rich - in fact the sort of person who scoops up a $300K townhome is probably a young professional with an office job who probably make the same or more as the residents complaining that they’ll bring poverty. It’s nuts!

If the median home is 350k, then there are already houses somewhere down around 295k or all the houses are identically priced.

Even now, $50k is only $350/mo. I doubt there's terribly many gangbangers for whom $350/mo is the cutoff.

They just don't want anything to change (literally "conservative" even if progressive politically) and will make any argument they can find for it.

At some point you can't win by convincing them, you either bribe them or steamroll them.

The bribery is very effective, make the developer build a new library or redo all the streets or something.

>so they have little interest in allowing any new construction that could be viewed as lowering their property values

This logic is so backwards on behalf of homeowners it’s unreal. Which cities are associated with out of control house prices?

SF, New York, Toronto…

What do these cities have a lot of? Housing. Increasing population density increases the tax base, which increases the level and quality of services which increases property values.

This trend shows no sign of reversal AFAIK

In my city we've had some success naming and shaming those people. After someone makes a really obscene comment like that we figure out who they are, or often we already knew, then one of my group uses their two minutes to put that speaker's name on the record. After these racist pricks realize we're paying attention, they stop coming to council meetings.

> The problem is people don't want housing for the homeless (or any housing at all, usually) built near them.

Oh, actually I think the problem is that I would like temporary housing to be built for the homeless, just far away from me. But certain people insist that they let homeless people, with their many varied problems, live up the street from me instead.

One would think that being willing to have temporary housing built somewhat distant from any major cities is a compromise on my part, but my opponents insist on getting everything they want and having homeless people live on the exact same block as me. It's like every other topic where people have zero intention of compromising, e.g. no abortions even in the case of rape, no guns allowed period, etc. etc. The internal debate people use to arrive at a position becomes: How can I best poke my neighbor in the eye and force them to exist in a political reality that they despise, instead of compromising? That is the position I would like to take.

And instead of reaching any sort of compromise that could help solve the problem, we get nothing, a political stalemate where no one wins and everyone loses. Politics in the US is absolute trash.

There is already inexpensive housing built far from any major city. How do you propose to get people to move away from their family, friends, services, and jobs?

Imagine believing that government budget sizes are anywhere near large enough to address the housing shortage. Only private activity is at the necessary scale.

Great take. We all know that America has no interests abroad, and it's always better to let the international order unravel. That way, we'll be sending our troops instead in a few years.

Bad take.

> It's unbelievable how much we've sent Ukraine while Americans are suffering at dire rates.

Indeed, it's unbelievable how little we actually sent via pallets (compared to past US wars) v. how much we sent in the form of gift cards for Ukraine to buy US surplus military hardware.

It's a very cost-effective program we should continue not just to defend our allies against a dictator but to keep our own economy cranking as money circulates among US employees and US companies throughout the military supply chain.

I hear there are still children in Gaza, we need to send more. wink wink

Borrowing money to pay for things that don’t provide value to the average American is Broken Windows at its best.

Every $ we send to Ukraine is borrowed from future generations. You don’t borrow money to spend it on things that don’t give you an ROI.

The ROI is the mitigation of a third world war by a mad despot and the consequential preservation of lives that would otherwise have been lost. It's a hugely valuable investment once you look at the historical costs of appeasement.

Also, to repeat the point with a bit more nuance: most of the money being "sent" doesn't even leave the US economy until it's in the hands of people e.g as wages. US military procurement rules mean that the aid money going to Ukraine for hardware procurement ultimately only goes back to US equipment manufacturers and other US companies in that supply chain.

Tldr: each aid package is largely a gift card to spend at the Made-In-USA gun store.

> The ROI is the mitigation of a third world war by a mad despot and the consequential preservation of lives that would otherwise have been lost. It's a hugely valuable investment once you look at the historical costs of appeasement.

Citation *massively* needed. There is no evidence that a 3rd world war was mitigated. There is substantial evidence that this war has gone on far longer than it would have if the west had stayed out.

> Also, to repeat the point with a bit more nuance: most of the money being "sent" doesn't even leave the US economy until it's in the hands of people e.g as wages. US military procurement rules mean that the aid money going to Ukraine for hardware procurement ultimately only goes back to US equipment manufacturers and other US companies in that supply chain.

I understand this.

What I do not understand is how making a massive wealth transfer from our children and grandchildren to shareholders of the military-industrial complex is viewed as net-positive economic activity.

Taking out a loan against the future productivity of your children isn't suddenly made okay because you spend that money with other Americans to send guns to someone in another country.

It's net-positive activity full-stop, not just economic activity.

The US dollar thrives because it's backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Government. Which in all practical terms means it's backed by our guns, or more precisely our ability to wage war. Closely allied nations and currencies such as the Euro, the Pound, and the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand Dollars similarly benefit.

So in immediate terms you may see it as a wealth transfer, in longer timescales opening up our economic horizons (improving economic and political conditions with our allies and opening fronts for investment with new allies) improves our ability to grow GDP, revenue, our tax base, and our ability to do more business in our own currency.

That's pretty much the payoff, if you're looking for one in strictly economic terms.

> It's net-positive activity full-stop, not just economic activity.

Net positive for who? It doesn't seem to be a net positive for Ukraine, who have effectively lost an entire generation of young men.

> in longer timescales opening up our economic horizons (improving economic and political conditions with our allies and opening fronts for investment with new allies) improves our ability to grow GDP, revenue, our tax base, and our ability to do more business in our own currency.

This is a wildly nebulous claim. At "longer timescales" I can claim the same thing: indebting future generations to help defend non allies ("new ally" is an interesting word for someone who wasn't an ally until they needed our help) without a clear ROI is a fantastic way to slow future GDP growth by continually increasing the amount of debt we have to service.

> Net positive for who? It doesn't seem to be a net positive for Ukraine, who have effectively lost an entire generation of young men.

Men who laid down their lives to defend their homeland. This isn't a serious counterargument on your part and devalues your standing as a good-faith participant in this exchange.

> This is a wildly nebulous claim

The history of our nation as a world superpower disagrees.

Cheers.

Ukraine money was to buy American guns and that will enrich a small group of Americans that have no problem with housing.

Sending money to foreign countries is a false problem.

There's more than enough money to go around. The "money" sent to Ukraine doesn't even make a dent in the budget. [0]

The problem is that it is an ideological decision not to give money to the poor, the homeless, the needy, the hungry.

The US isn't a socialist country, remember?

[0] https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...

There's zero reason why the US can't both support Ukraine and help solve homelessness. Homelessness is a product of a restrictive construction policies (namely, many US cities forbid or highly restrict construction of high-density low-cost housing), not a lack of funds.

Dropping our Cold War era bomb stockpiles on the NIMBYs would probably work, but that’s a tad excessive, don’t you think?

This reads like a russian troll post. I hope it’s not, but it does read like one.

How so? It seems like they just have a different perspective than you.

Because it repeats non-factual pro-Russian talking points and makes ludicrous claims. See the replies which provide context or refute the original claim.

The help sent to Ukraine doesn't make a dent in the US's budget[0]. It's negligible.

[0] https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...

Are you sure that if the US gov would not send help to Ukraine, that money will be used to help homeless people?

You are very naive if you think any of that money would go into helping the people in need. Those huge sums were approved and spent for the benefit of the military complex who traditionally sponsor political campaigns and outright bribe the government and the Congress so that the war machine never stops.

Don't buy the disinformation;not much of that money was actually sent to Ukraine, most of the money stays in the US. [0]

The US not funding school lunch programs, affordable housing, homeless programs is not a problem of lacking resources. It's an ideological decision. The help sent to Ukraine is actually negligible.[1]

There's more than enough money to go around; just look at the US's regular defense budget. This money being pushed to the MIC instead of to citizens in need is a conscious decision.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/29/ukraine-m...

[1] https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...

How much was sent to Ukraine in cash, exactly? And how much of that was taken away from housing budgets?

From what I heard, the vast majority of what was sent to Ukraine was military surplus.

(That's of course ignoring some pretty serious points you're making more or less implicitly, eg that Americans are suffering in a way comparable to "being shelled by Russians" or that the help is send to encourage their "being crooked" and not, you know, fight back against invading Russians. And you're also basically brushing off the part where the help came in with strings attached in terms of fighting corruption.)

Not the OP, but I recently found the following figures from Kiel Institute for the World Economy:

- US financial commitments 24.964bn €

- Military commitments 43.856bn €

- Humanitarian commitments 2.562bn €

> military surplus.

curious what happens to this if there are no proxy wars to sponser?

Some is sold to local police departments. Some is sold to your pick of developing nation warlords. Some is destroyed or used for training.

I do agree that it's kind of fucked up that US military spending is so huge that it can make a major difference to the war in Ukraine with mostly equipment it was going to throw away. But (1) that's not a problem that started in 2022 (2) I think there's a huge hypocrisy in complaining about the fact that this equipment is being sent to Ukraine, and not complaining about the fact that this equipment was bought/built in the first place.

If you want to make a dent in the US military-industrial complex, look at the F-35 program: the budget overrun alone is more than three times the worth of equipment sent to Ukraine (except it was spent in cash).

Then the war becomes proximate instead. Would you prefer that?

no? why would i prefer that.

Ukraine is not a proxy war.

Ukraine is being attacked by Russia. Ukraine fights for its survival. It has been doing that since 2014, when Russia first attacked Ukraine. It has been doing that without help by the US for 8 years. It will continue to do so, with or without US help.