alt Hacker NewsI’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything.
And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises.
And even in a society that forces those people into attempted treatment programs, there will still be a bit of time in between their issues manifesting and them going into treatment/therapy/confinement.
To have “zero homeless” you’d need to preventatively intercept these people before they become homeless and force them into confinement in treatment facilities and mental hospitals essentially. And that’s a dangerous game because you’re essentially taking away someone’s freedom preemptively before they become homeless
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This is along the lines I mean. Or when shared households break up, and some stay, some leave, which one should you send to the asylum forever and why not both? Or to jail for the fights they both participated in? What of the deaths by a thousand cuts and no one at fault for the murder?
But the idea that jails are an unadulterated societal good, or that they are the natural only option to police, is a crazy religion. Why on earth do we have no timely resolutions but through handcuffs and jail? There is expediency, and then there is externalizing the whole of the troubles to the smallest number of people, who could never overturn a majority, even if they had the vote.
I suggest the ability to put certain people in a metal box, at least partially for losing their grasp of a better role in the world, is a big, boldface moral hazard, and self-perpetuating, but with leering cheerleaders.
Some people are wild and out of control sometimes. Treating them all as permanent bad apples is just as animalistic.
>I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything
So? Why can't a 21st century country provide them with some at-least pod-like homes, so they are not fucking homeless?
You could also have "zero homeless" if you had a certain amount of cheap housing that even drug addicts and mentally ill people could afford. Or where the cost of helping them is not too much.
Like some housing that was built to be closer to "indestructible" than "nice" and was small, like 200 - 300 sq ft.