I'm moved by your story, but wonder what would you propose as a workable alternative for someone in your position?
It seems like the requirement that you not share sleeping space makes your situation a very difficult one to address, no? No-cost private hotel rooms seems financially a non-starter.
I read about a scheme in the USA, where they had built single-room accommodation on the edge of some town. These were small huts, no larger than a shed, and held a very small studio/bedsit setup. These were standalone units, basically sheds/huts.
The huts were cheap, and being self-contained they were good tools to help someone re-enter the world of housing, of taking care of housing, of cooking for oneself and cleaning, etc. Training grounds for all the skills you need to survive when you finally get somewhere larger, but also large enough not to give you shelter, security.
They had other things, like a central place to go and socialise, to get used to humans again, and counsellors and support people... but the key thing is a very small space that is yours.
That would be enough... a shed.
It need not be permanent, just enough to lift someone from the very lowest point in their life to a point fractionally above that.
In effect I did this too. For shelter from snow over Winter I would trespass onto building sites after they had closed and would sleep in the site office. It was shelter, there was generally a heater and a kettle. I could make a bed, I would leave the place tidy. But most of all, it was safe and I always felt confident I would survive the night (something I wasn't sure of the times I lay shivering violently under bushes in Manchester).
Little steps, lots of support, understanding. Just giving someone an apartment isn't the answer, it's about supporting people, to help them re-integrate. A home isn't a magic bullet for people not ready to live in one.
The way I see it (my background is Austrian economics), the poor and the homeless are people who cannot afford to live in a city. City-living isn't a right, it's for those who can afford it. No one is owed anything for not having enough money to live in a city.
That means in general I am against helping the poor and the homeless stay in the city, since the point of city is to be a wealth-creation center, not a welfare experiment.
You say you have been homeless. I'd like to ask you what you think of my idea: instead of giving the homeless shelter in the city, and having them drain resources from people who produce wealth, meanwhile not producing anything, why not give them a cheap house in a small farmland with some chicken or turkey, rabbits, a vegetable garden, etc?
That way we solve many problems. 1. the poor are now productive, they produce their own food instead and don't need to drain other people's resources to have food and shelter; 2. they are far from the city, which won't encourage laziness by sending people a message that they can't try and game the system by getting help while still living in the city as a non-producer; 3. it will teach these poor people good work ethics and how work is necessary for everyone to survive, and that they can't just rely on the fact that other people work.
I'd say that besides the farm life, they should have good public libraries nearby in case they want to learn something in order to be able to later join the city life again, this time as a productive member.
Am I being inhumane for trying to make producers out of every human being, and for thinking even the disabled can help pick fruit from bushes or wash them or otherwise contribute in a communal farm setting? Would you be for a program to send the poor and the homeless to farms and basically instate a rule where you can't live in a place you can't afford?
> You say you have been homeless. I'd like to ask you what you think of my idea: instead of giving the homeless shelter in the city, and having them drain resources from people who produce wealth, meanwhile not producing anything, why not give them a cheap house in a small farmland with some chicken or turkey, rabbits, a vegetable garden, etc?
I have been homeless, it's not something I just say.
I disagree with your entire post. It's based on this false assumption, "the point of city is to be a wealth-creation center, not a welfare experiment".
Definition of a city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City "A city is a large and permanent human settlement.[1][2] Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town in general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law."
Nothing in there mentioned wealth, or welfare. Remove that personal bias/motive from your proposal and your proposal very quickly falls apart.
That is before one would progress to the more offensive part of your argument: That those with money and wealth have more right to live in a city than those without. That those who work in lower paid industries have less of a right than those in higher paid industries.
It seems horribly convenient as a concept, that you could put the poor and homeless on buses and drive them out of your sight.
I would like to see the idea of a city as 'wealth creating' proven. It does seem much more complex an establishment.
That said, if people don't own land in the city and can't afford to rent some then they should not have a 'right' to use other's land there. Land ownership is a pretty basic part of society and I'd be hesitant to give everyone 'rights' to land in a city.
Those are the easy arguments to make. Let me also make a hard and unpopular one: Spreading our resources to people who won't provide ROI is a waste. In defending this, let me first claim broad experience here; I've let homeless people I barely know stay in my house and given them my keys for weeks. I have given out loans without paperwork. I've hung out with a lot of segments of society from prison inmates to college students from small towns. Just anecdotally, I think the ones who can provide real value are already finding their way through the system. For example, owning a computer and occasionally an internet connection is pretty much the only capital investment for getting a median-income job programming. I've lost count of how many poor people won't even try. Is that their fault? The fault of their upbringing? The fault of their genetics? It doesn't matter. If we throw our value away on them no one will get anywhere. Even putting aside questions of morality and property rights, if this was a communist dictatorship, the optimal choice is to play favorites with those that produce good value. And naturally we do invest in the ones that can generate value. One day that might not be true, but it still is today. Just last week I read about Ortega using Zara to turn himself from rags to richest person in the world. That's incredible upward mobility. There is more opportunity today than ever before. We just have to accept that opportunity != reality for everyone, ourselves included. I have limits. I know I won't reach the that level because I'm not good enough. But I'm good enough to admit I don't want to bring down those that can.
Regarding your first premise, specifically the poor. If I live in a city, and work, but my work only pays enough for me to be poor, you are saying I should be shipped out to the country and given a farm?
Under Austrian economics, how would your plan pan out? If the city removed all the poor people, who would do the work they were doing? Does Austrian economics believe that suddenly the wealthy, or rather the people who can afford to live in the city will suddenly pay increased wages to people wash dished, clean streets, do people's laundry etc.?
I could see it might work if as you say, its illegal to stay in the city unless you make a certain amount, therefore making it illegal to pay less than a living wage. Is 'minimum wage' covered under Austrian economics? Would it be set higher for more expensive cities? Or would the wealthy just keep the status quo by busing in people from the mandatory farms and still paying them shitty wages?
Also, do you think that people would be able to learn enough from public libraries to become a 'producer' as you say? Not everyone is an autodidact.
Lastly, what would you do about someone like me? I was homeless and jobless in Hawaii for 6 months because of bureaucratic reasons (I am a US citizen who lived abroad for all my life, and when I moved to the US I had no Social Security Number, therefore couldn't work legally until one had been assigned to me) I have been homeless a few times, but I have never once had to claim welfare of any type.
Would your system have me picked up by the cops for breaking the law and shipped to 40 acres with a mule to til the earth until I have learned the error of my ways, and good work ethics?
Or would a system that tried to treat the root causes of poverty instead of symptoms be more effective?
Instead of small farms and deportation of the poor how about livable minimum wages? Instead of good libraries, how about free university education? Instead of making producers of every human being, what about addressing the people who benefit off the production of tens of thousands of people, yet give little back to the system that allows them to do this?
I ask this straight forwardly, as I do not know Austrian economics. But while I wait your reply, I shall look it up online and see what it is all about.
Surely you don't believe that subsistence farming is the maximally productive occupation for every homeless person!
I agree that living in a city is not a “human right”. While, problems 1, 2, and 3 are apparently the most important poverty related problems from your point of view (perhaps because you don't want to pay for them), it's not clear that they are the most important problems causing poverty or homelessness in cities. For example, I have had many years of education, but I have sometimes been unemployed. Without the ability to move or retrain I would have been homeless, but not because I was completely uneducated, or unwilling to work, or unable to learn new skills. I'm sure you recognize that the labor market is dynamic and not perfectly liquid.
Either you unnecessarily assume that the homeless must all be un-, or under-employed because they have no education at all, or prefer to "game the system" rather than work, which is not evidenced, or you don't care that most of them could be more productive in some occupation other then subsistence farming, which is not efficient.
Only if all poverty were cause by ignorance, stupidity, or sloth, would subsistence agriculture be the most productive conceivable use for the labor of all homeless people. This could be true of a few homeless or poor people, but certainly not all. Supposing that we care only for efficiency, and not a bit for human dignity or other peoples' happiness, wouldn't you and I still be better off if we chose to retrain or relocate people so that their skills offered some competitive advantage, rather than remove them entirely from the economy?
The idea that the poor are just too stupid to know how to work is insulting. And 'transporting' folks is what they did to criminals in Britain in the bad old days (usually to Australia).
The point of a city isn't anything like what is suggested. Its a place where a lot of people gathered to live. Some got squeezed out as prices and the job situation changed rapidly. Blaming them is pointless.
> The idea that the poor are just too stupid to know how to work is insulting.
I read it twice, and I didn't see anywhere in which planfaster suggested that the poor were stupid. Either I'm missing it, or you're reading in to something that isn't there.
> Some got squeezed out as prices and the job situation changed rapidly. Blaming them is pointless.
I agree that the point of cities is inaccurate, but the problem isn't that they've been squeezed out, it's that they don't have homes, but are otherwise still there. Perhaps I'm just being pedantic here, but squeezed out implies that they aren't there any more, and in the case of city homeless, they generally are.
That said, you've completely ignored the point of the post. Utah has had success in giving away vacant homes to their homeless, with the qualifier that if you're getting a free home, you don't also necessarily get to pick its location. Comparing it to penal colonies is a straw man, but regardless, the question is whether or not a homeless person in NYC would accept a free home, perhaps slightly upstate. If not, why not? There are currently more vacant homes across America than there are homeless persons, and it's not infeasible to suggest that if adverse possession were slightly restructured, we could completely solve the problem of involuntary homelessness within a decade, though of course any such solution will introduce new problems as well.
Vacant homes across America are there, because there are no jobs there. Many of the homeless in the city may have actually come from those empty houses, abandoned with their upside-down mortgages and no jobs, hoping to find work.
> The idea that the poor are just too stupid to know how to work is insulting.
If you think that is insulting, try getting your ideas attacked through a straw-man argument - that's even worse. What most poor people do not understand, however, is that in order for them to live off welfare, somebody else is personally sacrificing their own efforts, labor, life, money that could be saved for their kids, just to pay for some guy who not only has no skills to help society in building wealth, but has a strong enough sense of entitlement to demand that someone help them survive while they get to pick where to live. I want to help all the poor, but being mathematically literate I know this can only work if we put these poor people in a situation where instead of takers, they be producers.
> The point of a city isn't anything like what is suggested. Its a place where a lot of people gathered to live.
You are over-simplifying it to the point of being ahistorical. No, actually cities came about because farmers increasingly wanted to take their chances at being entrepreneurs or employees in an industrial setting. So if you fail at your chance of making it in the city, then you should go back to a farm. Sounds logical to me. That way everyone can keep trying to make it in the city without being a burden on anyone else.
> And 'transporting' folks is what they did to criminals in Britain in the bad old days (usually to Australia).
This reads like an emotional sophism to make me feel bad about giving the poor food and shelter that they can actually pay for themselves. Again, think back to our recent past pre Industrial age (1850 and before). Most people were farmers. That's the default. Living in the city, where you can't produce your own food and have to rely on other people's services (which costs money) is not the default. If everyone in the country can never be poorer than owning a small self-sufficient farm where one can live by oneself without needing money, then can you better point at the part of this plan that makes you be against it? I honestly see no problems here, not even an inkling of disrespect towards the poor.
You make it sound like living off the land with a small farm is a particularly easy thing to do, and I don't think that's true, especially for someone with no experience with that lifestyle.
I can't imagine that a person who is unable to keep a home or job in the city due to mental or physical health issues would be able to sustain themselves on a farm.
Though I suppose rurality could help with drug and alcohol addictions by limiting access, you can't just pick people up and move them like that.
If you receive a plot of farmland that you can live off of without any other citizen's help, and you don't owe anyone anything for having received that plot of farmland, then are you a serf?
Plus, after living in that farmland for a while, whenever you think you have the skills to be employed in the city, you are free to try again. But it would be illegal to be homeless in the city, so that if it doesn't work out, you'd have to go back to the farmland you own.
Is that serfdom? The answer is no, and contrary to your question, you are not really sorry you asked, you are just doing this coy exaggeration routine that people who aren't interested in engaging in argument but still want to poo-poo it do.
I like this idea of receiving free property - real estate, housing, animals, etc. - all for the low, low price of not renewing my lease at the end of the year and quitting my job to tinker on a farm during springtime, before getting another job, paying someone else to make sure my chickens don't die.
Yes, just giving homeless people there own private rooms is a cost-effective solution. Having people live on the streets ends up being very expensive (emergency rooms, jail, etc). Shelters with shared rooms are scary and unappealing. Giving people stable, long-term, private homes helps them get their lives together and saves society money overall. It's important for these programs that people have privacy and automony to bring friends over and use alcohol and drugs in their home if they choose.
It seems like the requirement that you not share sleeping space makes your situation a very difficult one to address, no? No-cost private hotel rooms seems financially a non-starter.