The scarcity isn’t primarily the beds.
Obviously not. The existence of homelessness isn’t due to scarcity at all, it’s to do with a system that tolerates (even necessitates) homelessness. The image could have just as easily been someone sleeping outside an apartment with a sign advertising available units; they sleep, freeze, and starve, because our economic model rejects their basic needs in favor of commodifying them.
It’s not that hard a concept to grasp, it just seems like people have ingrained the logic of the market in their brains and can’t conceptualize the issue of poverty beyond ‘stuff costs money’.
Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
That’s just unfaithful interpretation of the argument, and you know it. US on average has 27 empty houses per a homeless person.
Pipoca@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s technically true, but really not important. Houses are defined as vacant if they’re unoccupied on the day of a census. There’s many reasons a house might be technically vacant, but not currently be able to house a homeless person.
Was the house just sold, and is it unoccupied for a week or a month between owners? It’s vacant. Did the owner just move into hospice or a memory care unit and their children haven’t yet sold the house because they need to arrange an estate sale? It’s vacant. Is the house under construction but is mostly built? It’s vacant. Is it not safe to live in, but not officially condemned? It’s vacant.
Want to move to a city? Either you have to find the apartment of someone moving out, or you have to move into a vacant unit.
Having a good number of vacant homes is a good thing, actually; having low numbers of vacancies in an area leads to housing becoming more expensive because you can’t move into a unit that isn’t vacant. Increasing housing supply relative to population leads to higher vacancy rates, but decreases housing costs.
Housing-first approaches to homelessness seem to be good in practice. But those are typically done by either government-built housing or government- subsidized housing; it’s mostly orthogonal to vacancy rates.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Are those houses like habitable right now? I agree that there is a mismatch but 1:27 ratio seems high to me.
archomrade@midwest.social 6 months ago
You might be confused because typically that figure refers to ‘homes’, not ‘houses’. Apartments and other multi-family housing types are included in that figure.
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Alright but still. There must be at least a million homeless Americans if not more. That would mean 27 million housing units sitting on the market now ready to go and not be sold or rented out? That dwarfs almost any city in the US, I can’t even picture it. My building has three units for rent all occupied so you would have my building in a line of 9 million other ones I guess it takes about 1 seconds to walk across the front of my building, a line of 9 million would take 2,500 hours just to walk past, or a bit under a third of a year if you walked non-stop 24/7.
This is very very large number.
echodot@feddit.uk 6 months ago
Right so the problem is that they don’t have money to buy those homes. It’s still not a problem with the bed store
Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
You understand what the word “visualisation” means, right?
archomrade@midwest.social 6 months ago
The problems are:
Interpreting everything through individuality is a choice. Just because you refuse to acknowledge systemic injustice does not mean it does not exist.