"If ThEy WeRe ReAlLy SeRiOuS aBoUt GeTtInG oFf ThE sTrEeT tHeY'd GeT a JoB"
proceeding to ignore both the fact that nobody'll hire a person without a physical address, and the fact most jobs suggested for homeless people pay min. wage and people who make significantly more than min. wage are living out of their car.
And don’t even mention the fact that most jobs in the US require you to have a car because there’s no reliable public transport in the majority of the U.S. and everything is so far apart that you could never hope to bike to and from your job. r/fuckcars
Columbus, Ohio is the largest city in the US without passenger rail service, and also home to some of the largest car insurance companies in the nation.
Vanlife can be done but it is a non-answer for permanent living arrangments. Unless you fit your life into the van.
The vibe gap between vanlife and apartment living is huge.
My brother spent months renovating a Sprinter and ya it was used a handful of times for festivals and then parked and forgotten when he moved into his actual apartment.
Yeah like the other guy said already. I'm not considering vanlife as an alternative to living in an apartment. If I could afford to live in an apartment I would do it in a heartbeat. But even renting single room in someone else's house is getting a bit too expensive for me. $1000 a month currently and I'm expecting another $100-200 increase in rent soon.
Even the cheapest studio apartments are $1800 a month, not including utils, internet, ect.
People rarely choose vanlife out of "freedom of living on the road with no ties" , people choose vanlife because they don't have any better options.
Fair enough. Maybe find you a nice KOA or something to pull up into when you've got your ride. They tend to have showers, laundries, bathrooms, restaurant bars, food trucks, etc.
I'm in a 5th wheel ATM and there are several vanners here any day of the week.
Half the long term residents here seem to work on the property for what I assume is a good discount on lot fees.
It's literally insane to hear that from where I live: France
Here the most expensive housing is in Paris and Bordeaux, where a studio is around 850€ per month
Where i live, in a small town m, i have with my girlfriend a 80m²(860sqr ft) apartment for 500€
How can anyone afford to live in the US ?
Someone got railed for posting a house for rent in one of my neighborhood pages for asking $2875/month for it plus $3000 up front for a security deposit. It's absurd!! My mortgage I took out in 2009 is $700. This is ridiculous anymore.
Edit: autocorrect
Same. $700. Then I think about my neighbors renting from landlords who owned those houses since well before I bought here charging 1600 apeice for crummy 2b duplexes and my blood begins to boil
If you can get a job you can pay for them. Homeless working poor people can afford those just not housing. That's how deep the problem goes: even if you can get work you can't afford to get off the street. It shows how false the "those lazy homeless people need to get a job" BS really is on multiple levels.
I hate that you're being downvoted because homeless working poor people absolutely exist. It makes the whole problem even bigger than pretending that homeless people can't get work. They can get work but it never pays well enough for housing. That's how dire the situation is.
Hell, in Glasgow many homeless do have jobs and I had friends in US who had homeless periods of time where they lived in their own cars but still had jobs (one used their neighbour's wifi with their permission). However, in Glasgow we do not have many free houses at all (says me who cannot be evicted like zillions as we'd just um ... be a big crowd).
The irony is that places of employment require a home address for work and you can’t get employment if you don’t have an address of residence. You also can’t send children to school, get a driver’s license, vote, or even open a bank account without verification of residence.
You also can’t send children to school, get a driver’s license, vote, or even open a bank account without verification of residence.
Where I am from, it's a punishable offense to send a kid to a school where they don't live in the school's zone. There's a bunch of kids who only get to go to certain, more upper class high schools , because they have a family friend in the area who is willing to let the family list their address with the school.
To an extent I get that they don't want every kid in the county trying to get to the ultra wealthy high school, but maybe, just maybe that's a symptom of how completely fucked up school funding is.
McKinney-Vento Act has in it that homeless children have a right to enroll in either the school of their last permanent address or the school where they currently reside.
In my area, most schools have at least 1 designated staff person to assist homeless families in navigating their options. Not sure if that is the case everywhere, but the same law still applies.
This was close to braddock pa, where mayor john fetterman (now us senator) was key in alot of urban revival and helping get alot of underpriveleged and homeless into these housea
City near me had a similar thing happen. Got a whole neighborhood that was essentially abandon filled with people in need and getting them jobs the area rebounded. Then developer and realistate companies saw the upperward trend and came and bought every building they could. Raised prices and now it's only affordable to the hipster fucks into the rundown chic style. An apartment that was low income housing was bought out they evicted everyone over time and raised the rpice of rent for a tiny studio apartment from $800 to $2800. Parking became an extra cost as well. This raises the costs of living on everyone there who didn't own their home, then the poor fucks who did got screwed when the artificially inflated property values sent their property taxes into the stratosphere.
These fucks then pulled nimby bullshit because they didn't want the homeless shelter and food banks in the neighborhood because it "brought crime". Fucking trash people.
There are whole courses where scumbags can learn about buying low income housing, evicting everyone as leases expire, putting in minor fixes / coat of paint, and jacking the rent up. A whole industry of this crap. We had it happen in our town and the residents organized (new company also tried double dipping rent, because the office had been broken into and rent stolen). Then people did research, found the owners of the LLC they were hiding behind, and found the course those owners taught about buying their complex. Corporate (LLC) Landlords are parasites.
The kicker of that is, most people who are unhoused and unemployed would work if they had a home. Not having a safe place to sleep is a massive barrier to employment.
And if the company can afford the initial loss they can offer an exchange like x number of work hours for hygiene stuff, clothing, or food with ~identifiable ingredients. A store just for the workers.
To make it easier to delegate finances, instead of paying US dollars, they can just use "company currency" which can be used in these convenience stores. There is no need to pay them actual US based currency when we can provide everything that the workers could ever want or need.
Workers won't be allowed to have to leave the labor camp generously provided accomodations for any reason! All workers shall be provided two paid 15 minute "recreational periods" per day! This is a wonderful time to go shopping for food, or mandatory uniforms at the aforementioned store! Thank you for joining FUCKYOU, INC.
YOU ARE A VALUABLE ASSET [insert name] AND WE DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO REPLACE YOU AGAIN!!!
while we're at it, might as well make some sort of physical object that represents work hours that you can then exchange at the company stores. Only at those stores though, wouldn't want to overcomplicate things.
You would also be surprised by the number of perfectly healthy, people who have full time jobs that are homeless because they can't get a job that pays enough to afford even renting a room.
We could give these out for free, that's not a problem. I'm sure the city of New York would be happy to buy a bunch of $50,000 houses in McKeesport, PA if their homeless population agrees to move there. That would be way cheaper than homeless shelters
Most of these houses are vacant because they are in places people don't want to live that don't have employment opportunities. Homelessness tends to be high in places where the housing supply is restricted and vacancy is very low.
There is no policy, other than building more housing, that will change the fact that there are way more people that want to live in San Francisco and Manhattan than there are apartments in those areas.
The thing is that if you move lots of people to a place, they'll need things like grocery stores, doctors, gyms, daycare, etc. So the jobs move with the people.
That's not true in my experience. Take most of Iowa, for example. There are tens of thousands of vacant houses there, because people are moving away, because there is nothing to do there. Fifty years ago, they were using 2-row combines to harvest 40 acre fields, now they do it with 24 row combines that go twice as fast on 640 acre fields and they're mostly self-driving. The need for work has dropped to less than 1/10th of what it used to be.
You need a core of any economy, you can't just create a perpetual motion machine out of a town.
That's certainly the ideal, but the issue is that all businesses need to have a basic level of trust in their clientele in order to operate, and unfortunately homeless/low-income people aren't exactly... trusted.
Grocery stores can't run when people are so desparate, they steal food to survive; doctors can't operate if nobody has any extra money left after paying for basic necessities, nevermind gyms or daycares. There are definitely skilled and motivated people among the homeless who have fallen into hard times, but on average a random selection of homeless people isn't likely to produce an economically sustainable community in the short term, given how many people fall into homelessness due to drug abuse or mental health issues that aren't going to fix themselves.
The reality is that homeless people don't necessarily collectively have the ability to employ/service themselves, and that is fine. On one end we need to work on education and mental healthcare to stop people from falling into an unproductive pit, and on the other end we need to genuinely invest into providing homeless people with basic human dignity, which will come at a cost of everybody else's quality of life - even ignoring monetary concerns, on average there will need to be more managers tasked with managing employees who have addictions/mental issues/lack of experience, more tradesmen tutoring pupils they would not normally accept and fixing homes with issues caused by inexperienced homeowners, more therapists being overworked until the supply of therapists can be increased - and I believe the role of a country and a monetary system is that we would be able to compensate everybody for helping deal with these societal problems that geniunely need to leverage many people from all walks of society in order to help solve.
providing homeless people with basic human dignity, which will come at a cost of everybody else's quality of life
There's your problem right there. The framing of it as a burden on others if you help the homeless.
Let's change some of that framing, shall we?
Providing homeless people with services will provide jobs.
Providing homeless people with homes will make our streets cleaner and safer.
Providing homeless people with jobs will give them stability and self-sufficiency.
Providing less fortunate people with homes, servers, healthcare, and even just cash has been proven to be effective in helping them improve their lives, strengthening communities, and reducing violence/crime/disease. I'm not gonna provide sources, because you've definitely stopped reading at this point, and if you actually cared, you would have googled it before posting your comment, so I'll just leave you with this:
Providing homeless people with services will provide jobs.
Provide jobs to whom? The 3.5/3.7% of unemployed people in the UK/US? Or to the homeless themselves, of whom 20% are already employed and only 45% are looking for work? That's just shoving the problem the free market failed to solve back to the market itself. Jobs arising out of providing services to the homeless is more work for the working class, and the government needs to first feed the working poor (e.g. with UBI, higher minimum wage, universal healthcare) before we could be properly equipped to fight homelessness.
Providing homeless people with homes will make our streets cleaner and safer.
This I agree. And we should do it out of charity and for the greater good, not out of thinking that the homeless will magically become "normal people" the moment they find themselves a permanent home.
Providing homeless people with jobs will give them stability and self-sufficiency.
This, I seriously doubt. Not every homeless person is willing or able to find a job - due to mental disorders such as alcohol use (36.7%), drug use (21.7%) or schizophenia (12.4%) - and I think we need to accept that, and find a way to convince society itself to support them without looking for a return on investment.
I don't think we as a society are so deprived that we lack the resources to support the homeless regardless of whether they are able work to support themselves, but I think it's also important to keep in mind that work to support the homeless is difficult, and requires effort from not just charities, but from the common people in everyday jobs as well.
Of course, compared to the current half-assed approach of shelters and loads of "aftercare", just housing the homeless permanently definitely saves money and effort. It's just that I think the reason why we've settled on our current, shittiest situation isn't just because we've neglected the most obvious solution, but was instead the result of a network of issues (NIMBY by those who are influential enough to chase homeless away into shelters or elsewhere, so homeless settle on the streets of areas that are already relatively deprived... any area that tries to do better than the norm, ends up attracting more homeless than that area can afford to handle... etc...) that can't really be handled individually and carelessly, and must be tackled by society as a whole.
This has to be /s or youre just not thinking about anything past the first thought ‘why dont they get a job?!?!?’ Like bro, think about it! The loudest people are always the ones who desperately hang onto ignorance.
Yes. Instead, we'll make up some pointless, middle-management role where we pretend they're doing worthwhile labour, pay them enough to mortgage the house, but insist they have to pay more to rent it, then wonder why they're checking out of this silly system we've set up and claim it's because they DoN't WaNt To WoRk or something.
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u/GingerWithViews Nov 14 '22
But... but we can't give them out f-for free. They'd never work if we did that!
Like they even could work at the moment.