458 sats \ 5 replies \ @Signal312 22 Feb \ on: The Homelessness Crisis mostly_harmless
I think this is not the only reason for homelessness, but is definitely an unexplored one - basically Cheap housing has been regulated out of existence.
I read a bunch of Horatio Alger "rags to riches" books at one point in my life (long story, basically I was procrastinating and they happened to be around where I was hanging out in the library).
Anyway, in these books, the hero would often step up from living on the street, to living in extremely cheap accommodations like a 5 cents a night bunk in a hostel, to renting a dingy room for a dollar a week, to renting a nicer room, etc.
Also in England there were options like the two penny hangover.
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That's impossible nowadays, due to regulations. Nobody can make money offering super cheap lodging.
Another one is - there's so many freebies available in many cities that people get in the mode of not needing to worry about earning enough money to support themselves. But people have to do something with their time, so it contributes to a cycle of addiction, crime, not being able to hold a job, etc.
I recall reading that in Toronto (Ontario, Canada), boarding houses and other cheaper setups were phased out and looked down upon during more conservative decades (pre-WW2 in particular). They didn't want spinsters (lesbians), bachelors (gays), and other anti-establishment types (bohemians, anti-government types, communists) to alter the character of traditional neighbourhoods. Pretty wild stuff.
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Interesting
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I just mentioned your point about cheap housing in this comment.
I also agree about the increase in freebies. This is one of the explanations why so many poor people in general live in very expensive urban areas: that's where the various forms of welfare are collected.
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Yes, and another set of regulations that I forgot to mention are everything that makes a city landlord-unfriendly. Many (most? all?) leftist cities are like this. Once you rent to someone, you basically can't get them out, no matter what. You start hearing stories of people needing to hire motorcycle gangs to get renters out of their home.
Small landlords can't handle this.
I knew a lady with a 4-plex - 4 townhouses, all in a row, in a leftist, west coast city. She lived in one, and had a trusted renter in another. She hadn't been renting the other two out because of fears over bad renters. Within a year she sold the place to a large company.
This type of thing, over and over, gets you what we have today.
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I have a friend who was a landlord -- owned like 12 houses in low-income areas, managed them all himself (he's a construction guy and knew how to do all the things). The stories he would tell about that experience would make a bestselling Netflix series, except it could never be told, would be canceled so hard it would wipe anyone involved from the face of the earth.
That was the beginning of a re-thinking for me about how human societies / governments work, actually. Never really considered that before.
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