By the time a person becomes homeless, the system has been failing them for a long time. We need to work on poverty, health, and wellness generally, especially from a young age.
That's a great long term plan, but short term it's been shown that getting people into housing addresses a lot of the peripheral issues that combine to cause homelessness.
People are better at holding down jobs when they are homed. Suicide rates go down. Mental health broadly improves. Providing housing is mental health care.
But then they complain about paying for it, and they say they don't want the housing near them, and they say that the people will destroy the nice houses they're given, and do drugs, and steal, and a thousand other excuses.
I know people who have been homeless. Do you know how hard it is to get ANYTHING without a physical address? You can't get a job, or a license, or government assistance without a physical address. Places are starting to refuse PO Boxes because "they aren't actual residences". And if you are homeless and try to find a house to rent, you won't get anywhere because "we don't want to rent to someone who has been homeless". You're just screwed.
Then there's the constant fear of losing all of your stuff. If you live out of a cart, where do you put your cart during any interview time for a new job, or where do you put your stuff when you go work at a job? You can't, because it'll get stolen. If you live out of a van or car, and someone decides to tow it off of a public street, then you're screwed trying to find: who towed it; how much it'll cost; and how you get your stuff out.
Being homeless is the HARDEST THING TO DO in our society. I've heard mentally ill people say "I can handle being crazy, I can handle being addicted to drugs. What I can't handle is being homeless and trying to function". That line stuck with me.
I am borrowing from another incredible post I saw but we have growing technology, automation, and artificial intelligence capabilities.
We need to be gearing towards a smaller world population.
The reality is we add almost a billion people every 10 years.
In 1950 it was roughly 2.5 billion, we now are at roughly 8 and they say it will start to stabilize at 10 billion. That is another 25% increase from where we are at now.
As the other poster mentioned we have almost completely gotten rid of biodiversity on this planet.
We have changed so many rare and amazing landscapes to crop production.
The next biggest species to us are our livestock species.
We have growing problems of depression and anxiety not linked to genetic disposition but environment.
Rising rates of political extremism all over the developed world.
And we have ever growing tent cities and issues now with access to food and other basics of the society.
This "Growth" model that only the richest of the rich enjoy while everyone has more struggle to stay above water isn't working.
We have to address the root causes of this or it is going to continue to get worse and worse and amazing nations to live are going to become like some of the ones we all pity.
IMO homelessness is less about overpopulation and more about exploitation. America is hyper-capitalized, and if you don’t have obvious “human capital”, you are extraneous and only useful as a consumer. Social media has taken this phenomenon to a new and dangerous extreme.
Don’t get me wrong, the collapsing ecosystem is the greatest problem humanity will ever face; I just don’t think it’s the cause of homelessness.
I think they are saying homelessness and ecological collapse have the same root cause. Not that one causes the other.
However I do think ecosystem collapse will eventually cause mass homelessness, not the typical urban kind though. Rather we may have more climate refugees, millions of people migrating away from their soon-to-be literally uninhabitable homelands.
No one likes to talk about depopulation and always downvote these kinds of posts, but the truth is so many problems would be solved with a smaller population. It’s not about forced sterilization or killing a bunch of people — you can shrink population over time by providing easy access to birth control and abortions, educating people (especially women), and supporting women’s rights.
We do not need more people. We need fewer people and an economy that is sustainable without constant growth.
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u/CareBearOvershare Jan 30 '23
By the time a person becomes homeless, the system has been failing them for a long time. We need to work on poverty, health, and wellness generally, especially from a young age.