Here’s the latest round table on housing.
This is incredible. The roundtable participants explained that the homeless suffer from diseases, mental illness, and trauma. And those living on the street are traumatized by it. They also say the process to get services is impossible to accomplish (I’ve confirmed this).
In other words, they are saying the homeless need housing to survive and cannot survive on their own without housing and services. I agree with their assessment.
Then Ben Carson says, “We want these people to survive on their own.” What an incredibly cruel, and devastating thing to say. How uneducated and callous, indifferent to the suffering of others.
One astonishing note:
It seems every participant is looking at the homeless as if it’s a personal problem. Like they chose it. They haven’t mentioned anything about societal problems! Like high rent cost, rent price fixing and low wages.
Externalities are the problems that capitalism creates. What is going on here in this situation is externalities. These generated externalities have to be paid for as long as these problems exist.
In economics, an externality is the cost or benefit that is imposed by one or several parties on a third party who did not agree to incur that cost or benefit. The concept of externality was first developed by economist Arthur Pigou in the 1920s. Wikipedia
It was said it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness. The US budget is $4 trillion and the economy is $20 trillion. The US spends $750 billion on foreign wars up $150 billion from last year and the 2020 stimulus just issued $4 trillion.
In the past if you needed a home you went into nature and built it. If you need food you went into nature and acquired it. See subsistence economies and the enclosure movements.
BUT NOW, if you wanted to build your own home, the state would block you. If you wanted to get food from nature the state would block you.
“So John, why are you homeless?”
“The city and state won’t let me build my own home.”
“So it’s the state that’s preventing you from housing?”
“It seems so.”
“So they are putting you at risk and endangering your life?”
We have 640 million acres of public land in the US.
Today the federal government owns and manages roughly 640 million acres of land in the United States, or roughly 28% of the 2.27 billion total land acres. 1 Four major federal land management agencies manage 606.5 million acres of this land, or about 95% of all federal land in the United States — fas.org
The state has power to give this out. The state has power of eminent domain to claim for homelessness. Blocking land is siege warfare. These are the actions of villains. Blocking people from food and shelter are the actions of villains.
If this doesn’t make sense, consider it this way. If someone blocked you from food and shelter and provided no other option is that wrong? We would say those people are blockers. They are starving you.
Your survival and housing shouldn’t be dependent on if someone else needs work. And someone else shouldn’t get to take 2/3rds of your income simply because they have property and you don’t!
Another note:
Many of the participants in the meeting have said over and over and over that homelessness is unsafe and housing is needed FIRST! Housing is needed first before everything else.
Benjamin Carson ignores this!
The first thing you do if you found someone in a desert is give them water!
By preventing people from building homes or giving them homes or unused property the city and the state is guilty of reckless endangerment and gross negligence (similar to manslaughter)! This is legal cause to sue the city for harm to homeless residents.
In other words any preventable death and sickness is the fault of those in charge right now. The mayors, the city officials, the directors of HUD are all accountable for any illness and death whether they realize it or not.
Here are quotes from the video with timestamps:
10:22
“Build relationships instead of throwing money at people in terms of getting them to change their behavior”
← My notes: He is saying, “the homeless” need to change “their” behavior at the same time as the city blocks them from building homes. This is called victim blaming or libertarian paternalism.
If the homeless had the money they would purchase a home. If the city let them they would build a home immediately. Every creature in nature builds a home if it needs one.
They are pulling an UNO reverse card and saying people with no power are choosing homelessness while people with power are blocking them from housing themselves.
16:40
“I’m a physician and I’ve practiced in the area of psychiatry for 15 years and worked with the homeless for 5 years. That came about because our public systems that are in place to help individuals are complex and have developed very long wait times.
In psychiatry in individuals who are homeless we’re talking about schizophrenia, serious bi-polar disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, autism spectrum disorders, serious addictions that lead people to be without housing.
So coming in early and stabilizing (housing) and offering care (mental health services) can alter the entire course of an illness.”here are
← My notes: She is saying that our society and the housing authority that is supposed to be housing these people aren’t housing them (wait lists up to 8 year).
She’s also saying these people are homeless because they have serious mental, or physical issues or serious addictions. She doesn’t mention that the city blocks these people from building homes.
Any creature in nature, no matter what condition they are in will build their own housing if they need it. And any society that prevents people from building their own homes needs to provide people with a home or a basic income as compensation for preventing them from a basic right. If they don’t their society is oppressive. An oppressive society is one that is actively harming its citizens.
17:54
“There are folks out in our community who don’t want to be in a home because of their mental health condition.”
← My notes: No, people do want to be in a home but don’t want to be in a shelter with pee stained, bed bug infested cots, in the middle of a large room with people who may or may not assault you in exchange for a few hours of restless sleep where they kick you out at 6am and may or may not steal your belongings. Many cities have created separate shelters for women and children because they know the general public shelters are not safe yet they don’t fix it.
In one city I called over 10 shelters for a homeless woman. They were full up and turned me away. They had lottery systems that excluded people. They had curfews where you had to arrive at 6pm and then were locked in for the night. They were located a long distance away and the homeless lack transportation. They weren’t solutions. Utah gave people actual safe apartments or homes and that worked.
19:19
“Chronic homeless
Average age of homeless is 58
Average time is 10 years
65% has 2 or more comorbid diseases
Ave age of death is <60”
19:44
“We have tremendous experience with this community and I can promise you when you live on the streets it will drive you crazy. It upon itself is a level of trauma that’s beyond anything you and I can ever really experience and this coming from someone who has spent 300 nights on the streets.”
20:10
“And this issue [homelessness] is totally mitigable. Phenomenal”
26:13
“The efficacy of providing behavior /mental health care services to people who are unsheltered is virtually impossible [I have confirmed this].
To try and keep someone on a treatment path when they are living on the street with the trauma that occurs with that and all of the different implications where am I going to find my next meal, a bathroom, a place to get out of the rain or cold trying to keep someone on a behavior or physical health regiment or case management plan is extremely difficult.”
27:00
“Permanent housing is a critical factor in addressing homelessness. We are not providing a roof for anyone that wants to get under one. That increases the level of trauma for longer periods of time”
27:20
“Our chronic homelessness is 30% higher than the national average and I firmly believe it’s because we are not providing the front end resources to give people the opportunity to get under a roof, get the essential resources they need, many of whom can effectively resolve with those supports, without the most expensive modalities that are tremendously short supply and take a really long time to get built or open.”
28:15
“The amount of money allocated per homeless person in Los Angeles it’s 400k per person.”
29:00
“Why is someone like me from the department of transportation talking about about homelessness? This doesn’t seem to fit. But homelessness and transportation are pretty synonymous because the homeless use highways as their residence.
With all the plans to reconstruct the highways all of these bridges and overpasses would be going away we realized internally we would be displacing hundreds of people. And so we wanted to be part of the solution and help anyway we could. …We were just smart enough to know we needed our local partners to address this local issue.”
30:52
“Then the governor asked us to establish a state sanctioned camp (with local partners).”
31:56
“The federal government sees supporting faith based organizations, non-profits and charities as an effective way to address homelessness.”
← My notes: This is incorrect. If your society needs charities then your society failed. Charities shouldn’t exist.
Any society that blocks you from food and shelter needs a basic income to function. Non-subsistence economies need a basic income or they are coercive. Charities, government programs and non-profits have historically taken 2/3rds OR MORE of the resources from the intended recipients. With a basic income, 100% of assistance goes to directly to the intended recipients.
32:48
“We all know what is going on [by the neglect] and in my opinion it’s not good. The city council needs to look at the city and decide if we want to solve this problem the right way working together to do it instead of turning this into a politicized circus.”
33:08
“The [unhoused] are not safe. The homeless community frankly are not safe. It’s not good for the homeless community. And where frankly the danger is rising on the streets of Texas and it’s not good for the people of Texas. It’s not good to be concerned about your safety. It’s not a good environment.”
End of quotes
The solutions they mentioned are like giving people bandaids as they are being wounded by society. They are focusing on the symptoms not the causes.
As Karl Widerquist says the. “Privileged people control all the Earth’s resources & only share with the less privileged who do what they’re told.
With Basic Income everyone gets a share of the Earth’s resources. Those who provide services for others get more.”
“Private property is oppressive without a basic income.”
Any society that blocks its citizens from food and shelter requires a basic income.
Here’s some ideas how you change it:
- Give people housing first (Utah solved homelessness but canceled it when other states didn’t follow)
- Give people a basic income
- Provide affordable housing (repeal the Faircloth amendment)
- Reduce rent to 4% of income (like in Vienna — mentioned below)
- Build Levitowns
- Allow people to build their own homes
- Remove draconian building restrictions
- Provide single room occupancies
- Provide rent control (add maximum profit margin for rent and remove double and triple income requirements)
- Use eminent domain or recover unused land, buildings or housing to house the homeless
Ben your actions show your indifference and cruelty. It’s up to you to prove otherwise.
How did Vienna solve housing insecurity in 1925?
“In 9 years between 1925 and 1934 the government of Vienna created housing for 220k people and they were able to pay the rent at 4% of the average workers wage and also provide housing for disabled and unemployed people.” — 45:17
Quote from Wikipedia:
“In 1919, the federal parliament passed the Housing Requirement Act (Wohnanforderungsgesetz) to enhance the efficiency of existing housing structures.
Low private demand for building land and low building costs proved favourable for the city administration’s extensive public housing planning.
From 1925 to 1934, more than 60,000 new flats were built in so-called Gemeindebau (“community construction”) buildings.
Large blocks were situated around green courts, for instance at the Karl-Marx-Hof (one of the hot spots in the civil war of 1934) and the George-Washington-Hof.
The tenants of the new flats were chosen on the basis of a ranking system in which e.g. persons with disabilities got extra points to be chosen earlier.
Forty percent of building costs were taken from the proceeds of the Vienna Housing Tax, the rest from the proceeds of the Vienna Luxury Tax and from federal funds.
Using public money to cover building costs allowed the rents for these flats to be kept very low.
For a worker’s household, rent took 4% of household income.
In private buildings it had been as high as 30 percent.
If tenants became ill or unemployed, rent payments could be postponed.”
There are 4 evictions per minute in the US.
First-Ever Evictions Database Shows: ‘We’re In the Middle Of A Housing Crisis’
