West Coast baby
Another fix: remote work for all who can. No more traffic, no more living close to economic centers (expensive housing), leaves a lot of available housing in the cities (no more homelessness).
My biggest worry is that people already have no sense of community. Third places (is it still a third place if we remove going in to work?) can’t really exist in suburbia. People sit inside when off work, drive to work isolated from everyone, then sit at work mostly not building a community. Americans have no sense of community, which I would blame for most of our current political issues. People spreading out and not going in to work (I’m not in favor of this, just not looking forward to this one effect of it) can only further degrade any sense of community that currently exists.
I don’t understand how you’re gonna have a good sense of community when you share 1sq mile with millions of others in a large city. What percentage of people can you even engage in friendly banter with? The community we have in our modest sized town is so amazing, my wife and I talk about how grateful we are to live here.
Our kids can walk to a dozen different houses where they can play. We are close enough with all those families that we could drop the kids with any of them if we needed to. There are tons of parks and great recreational sports activities to be outside.
I do respect others who choose to live all crammed on top of each other. I love the culture that big cities offer. I just couldn’t live there, it’s too impersonal.
People don’t really connect outside of echo chambers and then claim they believe in voter fraud because they encountered a different-looking persin at the polls…
I understand what’s trying to be said here but I’d pass on that.
I’ve lived in apartments most my life. Now that I live in a home that has a backyard, a garage, can’t hear what my neighbors are saying, don’t need to pay for laundry, don’t need to go down an elevator to throw away garbage, and don’t have to worry about people pissing in the elevator. I’m not going back to an apartment.
The only thing I don’t see is how it would fix people being homeless. Many homeless are unable to be properly housed because they have mental illnesses, trauma, etc. If you put them in an apartment without extensive further help, many will get back on the street and/or destroy the apartment. You can’t solve their problems with just providing housing.
is that truly the case, or just a pervasive urban legend?
which studies support this theory?
I think between their argument and your own, yours is the one in more need of citation. Which is more likely, that giving a house to everyone will solve homelessness or that some people have problems beyond just being homeless? He’s not saying that it wouldn’t help some people, he’s just saying that there would still be some number of people who need help beyond this.
giving a house to everyone will solve homelessness
Pretty much yeah. This is what Finland did.
No it did not. Finland helped about half of the homeless people. And that’s a very generous estimate because it’s only those homeless people who are actually accounted for.
This is because they only select those who can be housed and are already part of the welfare system. It’s also not just putting people in an apartment. There is still a lot of drug and debt counseling and mental help provided in the background.
And that’s for the model country for the housing first approach.
No, there aren’t statistics about these people. Just experiences and the experiences of others who work with them.
Many homeless people refuse to take up help like housing because they do not want to cooperate with helper organisations. And they also don’t want to get interviewed: https://idw-online.de/de/news765112
We don’t even really know how many there are because there are no reliable statistics. How would you count them anyway?
All housing first projects pre-select the people they give a home to. The reason is clear. They don’t have homes for everyone, so they take those which will give the best results. In Berlin, Germany they literally have to write applications for the project: https://www.berlin.de/sen/soziales/besondere-lebenssituationen/wohnungslose/wohnen/housing-first-1293115.php
https://housingfirst.berlin/aufnahme
And they need to already be in the welfare system!
The same goes for Finland, which is the model country for a housing first approach. Putting people who already are in the welfare system in homes with help offers has the best results. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol22num2/ch4.pdf
Best results means it works for about half of homeless people.
For the other half, they need a step-by-step approach to have them able living in a home again (or for the first time in a long time). You can’t just put them in an apartment with an address for counseling and that will work out.
Source: you can read about that in the PDF above, for example. Or any other study about the homeless which usually mentions at least the many who fall through the cracks.
These are migrants without refugee status and people with severe drug and alcohol abuse issues or other mental illness. It won’t work to “put them out of sight out of mind”.
Homeless people aren’t a homogeneous group of people. And while it works for some, housing first is not the solution. Because it leaves an estimated half of them behind. It also omits that there a still a lot of help going on in the background. It’s not just give them a home and that magically solves all their problems. Far from it …
I’m on mobile and can’t read German, I’ll have to wait until later to run those articles through a translator to see what they’re getting at.
But I do wonder about you saying we can only halve homelessness instantly, and the next quarter needs some help, and the next 10% needs a lot of help and after that things get more diffocult: that means it doesn’t work and isn’t worth trying at all
Wouldn’t halving homelessness be pretty damn successful?
Of course it is great but it won’t solve homelessness. Which is what the image suggests. And obviously it doesn’t.
What’s your tolerance threshold for a solution? One source I quoted elsewhere said it would solve up to 75% of homelessness.
People are allergic or immune to penicillin, that doesn’t mean that its not a solution to bacterial infections.
If someone said “Penicillin solves bacterial infections” I would also say this is not true. There are bacterial infections which can’t be cured by penicillin and some people can’t take it at all.
Understood. How should one phrase a vast majority success with a tolerance of a minority of failures in casual conversations?
Even if it has issues, housing first solves far more problems than any other solution. If you are so opposed to housing first initiatives, then propose an alternative solution that will work better.
I’m waiting.
You can’t.
Why do you think I am against housing first? I never said that I am against that. I said it does not solve homelessness. You need additional systems in place to solve it.
This assumes you kick them out after putting them into it.
No, you need to provide additional help to keep homeless people off the street. I only have experience with homeless in Germany, though. The reasons for homelessness can be different depending on the country.
Are you familiar with the “Housing first” model? It posits that even for people who need medical or living assistance, having shelter, a bed, a bathroom, a refrigerator, and a permanent address will allow them and whoever is providing support to deal with compounding factors and receive regular visits, Conversely, attempts to treat something like dementia or substance abuse on the street are next to impossible.
Yes I know. And all housing projects I know about pre-select the people they give a home to, often only take in those who are already in the welfare system and all these projects offer extensive additional help.
I feel like some people deliberately interpret stuff into my post just so that they can get angry (not you but, I got some really angry messages).
So to make it extra clear: Giving people a home is great! There definitely should be a home for everyone, it’s a human right!
But just giving people a home will not solve the problem with homeless! Putting people with severe mental illnesses, debt, etc. simply into a home does not work.
There’s multiple groups of homeless people.
There’s the long term homeless, who often suffer from issues like mental illness, and short term homeless, who usually don’t.
High housing prices absolutely causes people to become homeless when they lose their job, become addicted to drugs, etc.
Being homeless is itself traumatic, and exacerbates most issues homeless people have. Affordable housing and giving homeless people an apartment aren’t a panacea, but it does prevent a ton of issues for newly homeless people.
I don’t see how or where I said I am against giving people homes.
when you said…
The only thing I don’t see is how it would fix people being homeless.
Many homeless are unable to be properly housed because they have mental illnesses, trauma, etc.
If you put them in an apartment without extensive further help, many will get back on the street and/or destroy the apartment.
You can’t solve their problems with just providing housing.
That says to me, four times, that you are against giving people homes. Could you clarify how each of those points is a positive?
Literally none of this says: don’t give people a home. My point is giving them a home is not enough, it won’t solve the problem.
Is this a weird English language thing? Is this a Lemmy or an internet thing? People seem to deliberately put stuff into posts that aren’t said.
It’s even in the text you quoted from me that my opinion is just giving them housing won’t solve the problem.
How the fuck does that say “don’t give them a home”???
I think the missing context is that when you write with majority negative phrasing, people assume your argument is against it.
Consider: “You have to cover apples in sugar and put them in pastry, and then add custard to make me want to consider eating them!”
This sounds like you hate apples, not that you like apple pie.
I thought the situation was more like: “If you got apples you can make an apple pie”. And I was: “No, just apples make a bad pie, you also need the other ingredients”. And then people wrote: “How dare you hating apple pie!”
Look. Clearly I need some education in this area. Why didn’t the “projects” in the 80’s and 90’s effectively provide these benefits?
Because they were inadequately funded, regulated to low income areas with no jobs and shit schools. They we’re just a glorified hole to stick brown ppl
Unlike this new “grassroots” push for dense, mixed use housing, which will end up as a glorified hole to stick poor people of all ethnicities.
Have you ever been to other major, population dense cities around the world? Like, Tokyo, Kolkata, Paris or, hell, even NYC? They all have dense housing areas and urban planning. It’s very possible to create dense urban design without it becoming a shit hole.
It’s important to reconsider other aspects of urban design as well, though. “lol, just add more people” won’t work any better than “lol, just add more cars” did if taken in isolation.
Walkability, public transit, green spaces, close-proximity shopping and services, and so on all need to be considered. Otherwise you end up with exactly what already doesn’t work but now with more people.
I don’t understand how the high density housing solves traffic. In lieu of an additional solution (public transit) I think it would make traffic worse.
Edit
The argument seems to be: high density housing would naturally result in public transit infrastructure. I don’t think that line of reasoning makes sense, it’s certainly not an obvious inevitability that public transit will always, naturally appear.
The only reason not to build public transport is not having the density to support it…
Public transit works perfectly fine in a low-density situation. Your urban planning needs to accommodate it, though, with walkability being a prime concern.
A car-centric city will never mesh well with public transit no matter how dense it is. The best you can hope for is good subway coverage but that’s expensive and can’t be done everywhere. Nobody wants to take the bus if they feel they have no safe route to the bus stop.
But if everything is opened up with proper sidewalks and bike lanes and maybe tram tracks, if street lights prioritize pedestrians over cars, if walking to the nearest convenient stop feels safe and effortless even if it’s two miles away – then you get public transit that actually works.
It’s not terribly difficult. But your urban planning can’t be car-centric or you’re getting nowhere.
