Comment on There are 27 Empty Homes for Every Homeless Person
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 3 months ago
I’m not sold on this as a metric because it’s comparing the ratio of two bad things
Like, if homelessness started going down, then we would have 50 empty homes for every homeless person. Oh no! Things got even more unequal!
Homelessness is bad + empty homes because of equity real estate are bad. Just bring them both down. We can still have 27 homes per person and there be 100 homeless people and 2,700 empty homes.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Who is upvoting this wacky backwards math?!?
Imagine there’s one homeless person and 27 empty homes. If we put the homeless person in the home, there are zero homeless people and 26 empty homes.
I can’t believe I have to explain this.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 3 months ago
And my point is that that doesn't tell you a thing about whether there is or isn't a problem.
It happens that, in the US, there is a problem (way too many homeless people and way too many empty houses), but computing the ratio of those two bad things is inherently a pointless activity. That's my point.
Archelon@lemmy.world 3 months ago
See, I figured the point wasn’t so much computing the ratio, but the simple idea that homeless people and empty homes shouldn’t co-exist.