I think the homelessness is especially high in cities that are more temperate and have a red hot real estate market, places like LA, Seattle, Vancouver BC. Some government policies definitely don't help. Here are a few things that come to mind when it comes to homelessness.
  • Temperate cities allows the homeless to survive the heat of summer and the cold of winter.
  • Cities with a hot real estate market are usually desirable places to live or places with high income earning people. In both cases, due to fiat being a horrible store of value, real estate had become a store of value for people with excess money. When housing is monetized, it prices out a lot of lower income earning people, be it owning or renting. People simply cannot afford a place to live, so they move to the streets.
  • Minimum wage laws are making people unemployable. A business owner cannot sustainably overpay an employee (pay them more than what the employee help them make) or the business will fail. Without minimum wage laws, the low skilled people actually have a chance to get a job and learn more skills to increase their income. With minimum wage laws, many low skilled people simply cannot find work and rely on government handouts to survive.
  • I think homelessness has fiat written all over it. It might not be completely fixed under a bitcoin standard, but I think it will, at the minimum, greatly improve.
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Those are the points I generally bring up with my left-wing family member who live in those places.
I also include all the zoning regulations, building codes, and NIMBYism that prevent affordable housing from being built. Then I get going about occupational licensing and mass incarceration and ....
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