Homelessness and Poverty Are Policy Choices

The US is a rich country. That is it has the resources both physical and human to make sure all its citizens have the basics for a decent and meaningful life: food, shelter, healthcare, education, real jobs, pensions. No American should fear not having any of these things. No American should fear getting sick, growing old, being hungry or homeless. No American. Not one.

Say any of this to our rapacious looting neoliberal Establishment, and they scream “Socialism!” Well, if this is socialism, bring it on. They say it will cost too much. No, the wealth is there. This is about redistributing resources. What will happen is that the power of the rich and elites will be reduced and tied to providing actual benefits to our society.

All private ownership of land, and therefore what sits on it or what it is used for is conditional: mortgages, easements, zoning, eminent domain, property taxes, associations, clean water and air regulations, the list is extensive. The idea that an individual “owns” the land is a myth. At most, it is a kind of rental.

To be clear, in the US overall —

‘There are roughly 18,600,000 vacant homes in the United States as of February 2014. There are 600,000 Americans who experience homelessness on any given night, making the amount of vacant homes six times the amount of individuals without a place to sleep at night.”

https://www.mintpressnews.com/empty-homes-outnumber-the-homeless-6-to-1-so-why-not-give-them-homes/207194/

And that’s because artificially-created homelessness is much more than a policy decision by elites. It is at the _very heart _ of their wealth and power, which depend on it.

This was made blazingly obvious after the 2008 GFC, when Geithner and the Obama administration ‘foamed the runway’ for the banks by making war on the American population as a whole. The central focus of their strategy was, above all, on keeping real estate prices artificially high.

That was because the creation of financial wealth by bank ‘lending’ for real estate mortgage purposes remains the center of the financial oligarchy’s wealth and its predatory hold on society and the economy. When that system ends, so does that oligarchy. And they know it.

We care, but it is our economic reason to insert a minimal cost. If you can’t pay it, then there are cemeteries.

“Are there no prisons, are there no workhouses?”

I worked with rental management businesses for several years, directly with owners, tenants and vendors. With current surveillance and background checking technologies and a working knowledge of tenant law it’s not risky to be a landlord. About a third of applicants will have something up their sleeve but with reputable management companies the financial damage risk for owners is minimal. Usually. One once reputable company I know of wanted more revenue streams and replaced its qualified maintenance vendors with their own in-house ‘technicians’ drawn from the undocumented, inexperienced and recovering meth addict labor pools. That company also took advantage of the high demand and used application fees, as many as 50 per rental, as an intentional source of revenue (keep showing long after the qualified tenant has been found). LLC owner teams buying section 8 buildings (I never had a serious problem with the down and out) and then evicting them to do a full upscale remodel using undocumented labor was common. Overall, in my expensive west coast city I found nightmare tenants (which do obviously happen) to be much rarer than nightmare owners and managers.

Let’s do a “prior to” exercise. What was it like before the rise of homelessness under the Reagan regime? Was there homelessness and hunger in the US Before Reagan?

The answer obviously is “yes.” But it wasn’t quite the situation we see today.

Reagan is notorious for closing the mental hospitals which in turn led to an immediate and seemingly permanent increase in rough living by all sorts of people — not just drug addicts and alcoholics — who couldn’t get by in the “normal” world. Many of these people had been sheltered in mental hospitals prior to their closure. In the ’50s, for example, mental hospitals had a population well in excess of today’s prison population.

But even with the mental health care system that once existed, there were still “vagrants”, “bums” and “free spirits” unhoused or barely housed in the US, many of them. Much of Jack Kerouac’s literary output is about those people and celebrates them.

If you were poor in America at any time, the specter of homelessness and hunger always shadowed you. Evictions were commonplace and often brutal. Having nowhere to go once evicted was typical. Many of those who wound up on the streets eventually found shelter but not without struggle, and often not without losing cherished possessions and people (such as children and elder family members.) Rural residents sometimes had more options than urban ones in that extended families might take in down on their luck members or could sort out what to do with children and elders more easily and quickly than a bunch of strangers and bureaucrats could in the cities.

Hunger and dietary deficiency was wide spread, far more than today, though by tomorrow we might catch up with where we were. Americans weren’t just thinner in the past than now, they were lean and often hungry. Frugal habits combined with lack of food availability and very limited incomes made for a lot of lean and hungry Americans, some of whom were literally starving or very near to it. Hunger existed independently of homelessness, but the two certainly intertwined.

Prior to WWII, this situation was sometimes deplored but typically it was taken for granted. Even during the New Deal, the underlying problems weren’t dealt with. Certainly the racist aspects weren’t. That only started happening with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society — which was partially based on FDR’s Second Bill of Rights.

Housing, food, meaningful and necessary work, social uplift of the downtrodden, health care, education, etc. etc were all part of a huge effort to curb or end poverty and its deleterious consequences during the Johnson presidency and subsequently (Nixon kept much of the Great Society going and expanded parts of it). But there was fierce and lasting opposition from rightists, and libertarians, and piece by piece, much of what of what was instituted through the government programs of the New Deal and Great Society was defunded, jettisoned, spun off to the private sector or dismantled altogether.

So here we are now. Homelessness is intractable and institutionalized — and a source of revenue for thousands of NGOs. Hunger is growing but largely hidden — except for all those long lines at the food pantries. Mental health care is spotty at best, and there are few institutions to house the mentally ill — except prisons, where “care” is an oxymoron. Extended family support is widely unavailable and apparently becoming less so.

The fact that there are so many vacant properties — far more than the number of homeless at any given time — was made note of during the Great Recession of not so long ago, and many proposals were made to utilize some of that housing stock to house the homeless and were promptly dismissed on liability and other grounds. Better by far to keep the stock vacant and provide alternative and difficult to access shelter for the unfortunate than to mess with the private property (ie: bank) overburden of vacant housing. Never mind that whole cities in parts of the country are nearly depopulated and a majority of housing stock stood vacant and deteriorating. The sacredness of private property had to be maintained. No matter what.

Well, maybe that time is coming to an end. It should have done so long ago, but the struggle was barely engaged before the forces of reaction won. And now their grip is tighter than ever.

Liberals are AMAZING at “thinking” with their feelings.

Not so great at anticipating second and third order consequences.

How are the homeless going to buy or rent those empty dwellings, hmm? Do we just GIVE it to them?

You think that wouldn’t be taken advantage of by the same people driving BMWs but paying their groceries with food stamps?

You think that wouldn’t serve as disincentive for anyone to pay high taxes so other people could live free, and just leave an awful state like NY?

You think it maybe would crash real estate wherever this is implemented now that a nice family is living next door to mental / drug addicted / dangerous person?

For all your “intelligence” it’s mostly just emotion based ideas over here. Moist robots.

“No, the game never ends when your whole world depends on the turn of a friendly card.” –Alan Parsons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsa6ojQcYXQ

A significant percentage of the homeless are veterans. Losers. In Lemon world they should’ve been serving themselves instead.

There is are homelessness correlations with rent increases and drug addiction. So make more money and stay off the drugs. It’s all so simple.

Unemployment is also a policy choice, since useful things to do are not scarce and money to pay people to do useful things is also not scarce, if you use fiat money. Not only is this related to homelessness, it is also critical to simply being a part of society.