Re: Trump's latest lunacy

On 3/25/2025 11:24 AM, Don Y wrote:

On 3/25/2025 7:48 AM, bitrex wrote:

So just build houses for the homeless and then they won't be homeless anymore,

 No.  There will *still* be homeless people, regardless of the level of
support that you provide.

Sure, there are no perfect solutions. So what.

Unless you resort to "institutionalizing" people "for their own good".

Many of he homeless we're discussing are drug-addicted, and lots of Americans seem to want that for the seriously drug addicted. They seem to believe that drug addicts who aren't "trying to get better" need to be forced to.
They seem to be under the misapprehension that recovery from serious drug addiction is a matter of like, finding the right therapist vs. fighting one of the most complex and poorly understood conditions in modern medicine, with relapse rates worse than the worst cancers even with the best care money can buy.
Unfortunately the outcome of many severe disease processes without reliable cures is death. But the ones who are destined to recover have a better shot at it with stable housing.
But yes, institutionalization and forced treatment with non-evidence based medicine is doomed to fail and the amount of money that can be wasted there for little result (and taxpayer outrage at it) far exceeds the little result that could be obtained by cheaper means.

Housing needs to be *affordable* and sited in locations that folks
will be comfortable living (and MAKING a living).  No one wants to
"invest" in places where the only folks who will want to habitate
can't afford to provide sufficient profit for the investor -- esp
if there are other places where they can make a bigger, quicker buck!

There's a trickle-down theory of housing that if you just build new market-rate the prices on older stock will come down, there's a certain logic to it but proponents sometimes use Tokyo Japan as an example of a city that did it "right."
Japan is a terrible example of doing something "right" they had the better part of two decades of economic stagnation and a whole lost generation to help keep their housing costs low, it wasn't just urban policy.
Meanwhile the crisis is likely to only get more pressing in the US as housing and particularly rental inventory remains low, and use of AI tools to screen renters is bringing the same "fairness" to the rental market as resume panopticons brought to the IT hiring business.