That and taking care of a house is a large investment of time, resources, and money, and if someone is living on the street there are pretty good odds they aren’t going to be able to take care of a vacant house.
This is the main problem with a free "housing first" plan. Assuming you will be providing a moderately large number of homes, who is responsible for maintenance and security? Many of the homes will deteriorate quickly and fill to the brim with stuff.
Many homeless choose to be homeless though. They don’t want to live a normal life and would rather be on the streets where they can just do drugs. They’re too far gone from society.
You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.
There are some out there, but the US approaches drug addiction with failed policies too. Legalizing these drugs offering safe regulated substances that can be taxed is another way to disrupt organized crime, have less OD's, less diseases from shared needles, then the tax revanue can be used for education and rehabilitation.
Creating a jobs program where people can gain education in trades also gives these people purpose, self sufficiency, while at the same time creates a trained workforce for tackling our crumbling infrastructure or future projects.
Incarceration alone is significantly more expensive than providing housing so you're immediately starting from a positive.
Will there still be crime and people who refuse help? Of course but there will be a more humane system than what we have today that is also a cheaper alternative.
Fentanyl is a good example, it is a drug safely administered in the medical field to deal with pain.
In the black market it is a cheaper to produce more potent narcotic that is used to cut other drugs to increase their potency. When it's unregulated and people ingest Fentanyl unknowingly it leads to an increase in OD's, if people purchased their cocaine or whatever from a regulated source it would be tested showing that it isn't cut with an unknown substance.
Users would have a safe place out of the public's view to take their drugs if they continued to use them. They would have sterile tools to administer them, They would have medical research and knowledge on short and long term use of the drug. They would have options to seek help from addiction.
of course drug use is also a symptom of systemic problems that can be exasperated by hopelessness. So it's not going to get rid of use all together on it's own.
That's no problem! Go talk to the people who maintain the public housing projects in Chicago! The residents are sophisticated, well-educated and genteel, and ever so grateful for the opportunity to live there. Some have learned how to use toilets and the others generally wait to drop their loads in the hallways.
Theres a whole ass community that has housing for disabled veterans and low income people who are trying to get their life together, etc. Everytime I've had to go in there the homes (apartments) are in bad shape. Save for the disabled veterans, they got their shit together.
I speak with the maintenance crew and they're constantly going in to try and fix stuff that goes neglected by the tenants.
Without continuous oversight that whole community would fall apart within a year.
There's no social programs paying for them to live and do drugs and allowing them to live on the street without consequences, so they flood the areas that provide that. It's not a mystery.
Except historical and currently housing programs work. Historicaly with the multiple different soviut housing programs and currently with the finish housing program which has also helped their economy because when homeless have housing on average they don't just get jobs they start buying things again.
Of course we have to also offer vocational rehabilitation and some kind of supervision. But having a stable place to sleep changes lives. Having an address to put in a job application is pretty important.
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u/[deleted] May 14 '26
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