While perfectly healthy people choosing eking out a meager living of booze or drugs by panhandling on the subway is irritating, the real issue is that many homeless are not homeless by choice, but because they have mental illness that inhibits their ability to work or associate with people.
Any solution aimed at punishing the voluntary homeless while ignoring the mentally ill is missing the point.
Young, wealthy, privileged people like the majority of the audience of this site have no concept of how easy it is to fall through the cracks and lose everything.
And the problem of poverty and homelessness is only going to grow. The majority of Generation X has NO Savings for retirement [1] and what do you think will happen to them?
And in fact one of the cities having an epic and fairly invisible homelessness problem is San Francisco [2].
There may be a very small minority of people who choose to be unhoused; but they are generally not the problem.
1. http://rall.com/2014/10/13/syndicated-column-millions-of-gen...
Source: http://www.sfgov3.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=4...
Well, given my druthers I'd ban those too.
Cities are very dense and, in the scheme of human existence, unnatural places. It takes effort and rules to make tens of thousands of humans occupy the same space and stay sane. That is why cities have the ability to pass ordinances to restrict all sorts of activity in public spaces. There is a right to freedom of assembly, but that does not mean you can assemble a crowd in the streets or sidewalks at any time, you need a permit. There is freedom of speech, but there are ordinances against playing blaring music or disturbing the peace. There are laws against unsolicited phone calls and spamming. There are ordinances banning neon signs on some streets, to prevent a race to the bottom where stores compete for the most obnoxious store frontage. Etc. etc. I view any form of asking of money to strangers on city streets to be a form of spamming. It is perfectly within the rights of a city to ban it.
I think that this kind of statement must be qualified very carefully. I believe (though I don't know) that cities are unnatural in the sense that they don't arise in nature among other animals than humans; but I'd be reluctant to call them unnatural for humans, in the sense that it seems to me that a large part of what makes us human is the ability to live together and function (well or poorly!) in large groups.
Depends on what you consider a city. Ants, bees, termites, naked mole rats all live in densely populated 'buildings', with specialized division of labor between their inhabitants. Also, bat, bird or seal colonies can get incredibly dense.
I think that there is no better way to learn interesting facts than to make confident assertions on the Internet. :-)
But the current mainstream thinking of relativism, where values are inverted, also thinks learning is bad (which is why we don't do it in schools and universities anymore), and so earnest discussions are discouraged and deemed offensive (but 5 minute shout matches on the news are still fair game).
Sorry if that seemed rude or anything.
EDIT: example of this at work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8514048
edit: https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/73/Sao_Paulo_A_City_Witho...
I would have no problems with, and likely endorse, a private city banning many forms of public solicitation. It gets a lot more complicated when we are talking about public land.
There's a reason why ex-military are disproportionately homeless. These aren't lazy people or people who don't know the meaning of hard work. These are people who have sometimes serious mental health issues (e.g. PTSD, depression, alcohol addiction, etc) which make holding a job difficult or impossible.
20 hours of work might be difficult for many. Also who is going to live in a dorm with addicts, people with other assorted mental health issues, and people with various criminal records? There's a reason a lot of homeless people avoid "shelters," those places are sometimes MORE dangerous than prison (wanna get stabbed? Because going to a homeless shelter is a good way to get stabbed).
Honestly there isn't a "one size fits all" solution to homelessness. All homeless people are homeless for different reasons. All we as a society can do is start dealing with SOME of those problems one at a time.
If you do want to do the dorm thing then security has to be priority number one. For homeless people the streets can actually be safer than living with some of their peers.
The issue with the homeless isn't that the jobs don't pay enough to keep them off the streets, it's that they lack the mental faculties to hold onto even the most basic of jobs. Alternatively they're just exploiting suckers for easy money- a reality that many feel-good white evangelists like to pretend isn't a significant reality.
1) Universal basic income. You get paid like $10,000 no matter what.
2) Eliminate minimum wage. Anyone is free to earn extra if they so desire.
3) Outlaw rent control. Now you have more abundant housing.
That wouldn't take care of all of it, but it would sure help.
One issue: how do you disburse the income? What happens if someone blows it all on drugs, and then is out? We're sort of back where we started. Could we then just let the person starve or whatever, and say, "well you had your chance."? Push comes to shove, I don't think I could.
My solution: Government provided withdrawal systems (ATMs or something like that), that provide $27/day (to use your number). Most people who unwisely spent their $27 could manage to wait another day and then get food.
Problem: How do you pay for all this?
Solution: A low-percentage wealth (aka capital) tax. It's a redistribution of wealth, but if you outearn/outinvest the rate, then you can accumulate wealth. Could then do away with estate taxes. Ideally I'd cap the Basic Income Guarantee as a percentage of this wealth tax, evenly distributed, and not a fixed number. As the society gets richer/poorer so does the distribution.
Then, just add in single payer health insurance, and remove minimum wage, social security, medicare, medicaid, welfare, and all sorts of other systems and we have my socialist/libertarian paradise. : )
However, I don't think your first solution solves your first problem. I don't have a good solution for it either, though.
I like your second solution, but I would prefer a progressive capital gains tax + a carbon tax. Basically you only get taxed on your wealth if you earn about a certain yearly amount.
If someone is persistently unable to meet their needs with access to a basic income, they need a different kind of help. Hopefully we could provide that help. We're not back where we started - we've learned things, and we've helped the others, and can now focus on solving this different problem.
The biggest problem preventing more housing being built now isn't rent control, it's zoning usage and density laws. Most of the time low-density zoning is enforced for the benefit of existing house owners to artificially inflate the value of their properties. This (and Proposition 13, a law that's supposed to provide relief for property tax rate increases but ended up being a huge disincentive to sell real estate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%2819...) are the major factors keeping housing supply from increasing to meet market demand in California. Rent control is wrong, but it's not the biggest problem.
There's multiple interactions implicit there. That's fine, just noting it - I agree that would be a consequence.
Also without rent control, you will suddenly find cities suddenly very empty of people able to do things like get you your coffee. And shipping them in every day from 100 miles away is a dystopian nightmare.
Luxury apartments are lucrative, sure, but if you can fit more rooms into a given space you can often make even more money. For example if you could have 1 apartment and charge $3000, or 2 apartments and charge $1700, the 2 apartments are a better deal.
Citing Hong Kong struck me as odd. It's probably better being homeless in certain states. I think most people have seen the following, or similar, set of pictures about Hong Kong micro-apartments:
http://inhabitat.com/exhibit-on-the-micro-apartments-of-hong...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cage_home
Real urban planning has low income housing distributed throughout the city. If not, the wage slaves have to be shipped in. Some form of rent control/social housing incentives have to be in place. Otherwise you get situations in the states where welfare mothers have to bus 3 hours each way to get to their minimum wage job.
As a prelude, remember that your proposed system basically exists. Project housing isn't a novel idea. The homeless are by and large the folks that can't or don't want to get themselves into project housing.
In a rather odd turn of events, when I was 19, I ended up staying in a homeless shelter for a week. It was an incredibly interesting experience. For most of a week I stayed there, ate in soup kitchens and had a rather interesting look from the inside.
For the most part, in the shelter I was in, I saw two big categories of folks that were there:
- Folks that were crazy. This included long term drug and alcohol addicts. They were probably a slight majority. The type and severity of crazy varied, but you got the sense that the goal with those types of folks was helping them to the extent possible, but in most cases, they were often going to need assistance for the remainder of their lives.
- Folks that were pretty darn normal, but had two things go particularly bad in their lives at once. This group was pretty surprising for someone from a middle class background. These people seemed totally normal to me. There was one combination of events that was so common that I saw it several times -- people who'd lost their jobs and their wives (it was a men's shelter) had kicked them out at the same time. Some of these people had graduate degrees, reasonably respectable middle class careers, and so on ... but for one reason or another all at once they had no money and nowhere to live.
Neither of those cases would be especially well addressed by your proposal. I'm skeptical that it would do anything other than make rich people feel better about complaining about the homeless, but really, that sounds like what it's designed for.
Really, wouldn't option #1 help the normal, hard-luck people quite a bit? It would give you a permanent bed, and address to get mail, etc. while you applied for jobs and got back on your feet? It seems like an immensely superior option to the status quo.
As for the crazy people, I agree, which is why I edited my answer to make it clear that there should be government provided permanent living arrangements that are supportive for the types of problems people have. The normal hard luck people should not have to live in dorms with crazy people and drug addicts.
2) Make being homeless illegal.
3) Eliminate freedom of travel for the homeless.
I think I prefer the status quo to your version of a solution.
IANAE, but I don't think that's how slavery worked.
What? You are being spitefully obtuse. With slavery, the entire problem is you cannot leave your job, you are owned, and at the mercy of your owner. With my first bullet point, I am simply creating an option that does not currently exist.
#2 is the more controversial point. My gut and personal preferences say that the long-term utility gain to the general public plus the homeless person of moving them into dorm living exceeds the short-term utility loss to the homeless person of not being allowed to sleep on the street, and being forced to move into the dorm living (provided the dorm living is actually clean and maintained, and is not like awful shelter living).
Under the proposed homeless people have two choices: 1) Live in the provided housing and work 20hrs a week for no pay. 2) Go to jail and possibly be forced to work anyway.
1) + 2)
edit: shkkmo and VBprogrammer are right. 1) = dormitories w/mandatory unpaid labor; 2) = illegal to be homeless; 3) = restrictions on migration.
What harm does homelessness cause the general public? Does it negatively impact their everyday life?
>>Guarantee all people access to cheap, government provided dormitory style living, with a kitchen and basic food staples, in return for 20 hours of very basic work (picking up trash, watching security cameras, etc.).
This is what slavery is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
They're not equal at all.
Now, there is another factor that perhaps you could have been clearer about that would help support your case. You could argue that there are dynamics in society that drive people into #1 without having any real choice. That's a different problem, but still not at the level of what slavery was.
e.g., the criminal system becomes easier and easier to fall into everyday and extremely hard to get out of.
You could argue that suggestions 2) and 3) are an intentional plan to restrict people to a single choice.
What was that person thinking, offering me a voluntary position I can leave when I wish. The nerve of some people.
In his version, you get arrested for begging, shipped back to your home town, perhaps the desolate place you left in hope of finding a job before falling on hard times, or perhaps back to a place where your abusive father or partner can find you again.
And you get to pick up litter off the street or whatever menial job is available, not in exchange for money like a normal person, but in exchange for a room and basic food. Until you can somehow find a way to move into an approved place of living.
Not to mention that even in the nice comfortable version of reality he pretends could possibly exist the problems of those homeless people won't simply disappear. Drug addiction, alcohol problems and mental issues will still be rife. The utopian clean and well maintained dorms will soon be more akin to prisons with guards trying to limit the contraband taken in. Obviously that will fail, if the modern prison system is anything to go by.
3) How do you propose to enforce that they use the one-way bus ticket? How do you keep them from coming back?
I think this problem may be a bit harder to solve than you think.
But only if we don't implement 2) and 3) because those will force people to have to choose to participate in 1) and not everybody can.
1) Guarantee all people access to cheap, government provided dormitory style living, with a door that locks, a kitchen and basic food staples, and security screening of fellow residents. There would be different forms of permanent living for the mentally ill, drug addicts, recovering addicts, or able body people who have fallen on hard times. It would seem reasonable to require the sane and able bodied to do 20 hours of very basic work (picking up trash, watching security cameras, etc.) in return for the living. [this line has been edited, see footnote]
2) Re-enact and enforce vagrancy laws. No sleeping in the street, no panhandling, no begging, no telling manipulative sob stories on the subway.
3) Make the support for 1) the responsibility of the community they are from. The problem right now is any community that wishes to be generous to the homeless becomes a homeless magnet. This creates an incentive for cities not to be charitable, and to not take care of their own. The cities that are generous then get mocked for their homeless problem. Instead, if San Francisco police arrest a vagrant, they should make an effort to find out where his closest family from, or where his last established residency or hometown is, and then give him a one-way bus ticket back to that town.
Unfortunately, liberals are generally against #2, conservatives are against #1, no one even talks about #3 and so nothing gets done and the problem, which could be so easily solved given our resources, persists on and on.
(a) Edit/footnote: obviously many homeless people have drug and mental health problems that would make dorm living and performing a government job infeasible. There also needs to be funded supportive housing and programs for those cases. Also, there needs to be different levels of dorm living so those trying to escape drug addiction are not around those who are still using. The dorm living would need rules and management to prevent the problems that plague homeless shelter.