I never understood this. How can anyone say with a straight face that the solution to homelessness is anything other than providing free housing?
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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House them AND guarantee they'll never get out of the system.
What if we commoditized the homeless as a profit center for government contractors?
But then we complained about how much this was costing the public sector, so we privatized the entire state bureaucracy and billed it out of the public coffers as "National Security"?
And then if you complained about the horrifying abuse of civil liberties, we labeled you an enemy of the state and threw you in jail as well?
I can't think of anything more AnCap than this.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic but an ancap would only agree with half of this. The difference is instead of the government oppressing you it'd be google or something
Peter Thiel is an AnCap, though.
But there are "for-profit prisons," I personally am not sure how that functions, but also the inmates are required to have a job in the prison earning just a few insulting pennies per day, becoming useful to society making license plates or whatever the heck labor they make prisoners do.
They turn a profit by contracting their services out to governments and businesses
Besides the slavery, government also pays them to keep people in prison. Then they can use all that money to lobby for things like weed being illegal so more people go to jail, more immigrant harassment, etc
because they view it as a moral failing instead of an outcome of a system
they view the world as mostly fair in large part because they've never really struggled or worked hard and had it amount to nothing despite there best efforts
they view homelessness as the end point of a series of bad decisions the person experiencing it has freely chosen this is why you commonly hear people say the majority of homeless people are drug addicts or antisocial people and choose to be homeless despite insert program name existing
in this world view giving a homeless person free housing is rewarding bad people who makes bad antisocial choices on purpose because they are bad
it can be both. and in reality, it tends to be a product of both things. it can also be a product of mental illness combined with the other two things.
a lot of homeless people's stories are a combination of bad luck and bad choices and a system that has very limited and narrow pathways out of homelessness.
but it's true people tend to believe it's one or the other.
and for some homeless, it is very much one or the other. not all homeless folks are homeless for the same reasons.
the difficulty really lies in how much resources are you going to contribute to certain particular difficult people? there is a significant subset of the homeless population who do not want to become productive citizens and I'm not sure it's morally correct for us to force them to so so. I mean, are we suppose to jail addicts if they don't want to anti-addiction treatments and force them into it? or do we allow addicts to decide for themselves when they want to stop being addicts?
most people are really uncomfortable with putting themselves in the shoes of these folks and the complexities involved. they tend to either demonize or anglicize them and fail to be able to imagine the circumstances under which they could be come homeless, especially if they never lived with the shadow of that possibility in their lives.
One problem with giving homeless people free homes is that everyone else will start to wonder why the hell we're working so hard for 90% of our income being taken by landlords or mortgage companies, when we could simply stop working so hard, become homeless, and get a free home. ⁉️
You're probably joking but there are plenty of countries that provide housing for the homeless where this doesn't happen. If you have your base necessities met then that just further incentivizes you to further develop yourself. People want to feel useful and they want to contribute.
(try telling American conservatives that)
Right, you could totally live in a hovel with 40 other people instead. And share a single bathroom between you. It's genius?!
There are plenty of people who believe you deserve to die for the crime of being poor.
I can: the solution to homelessness is a combination of mental health ed in schools, free & non-judgemental mental health support (incl. medication), free addiction recovery programs, free food, job & community support, and free housing.
If you just provide free housing, there will be a significant proportion of people who would not be able to fully benefit from it due to mental health issues, addictions, and lack of purpose in life.
"That sounds like a lot of work. Can't we just harass them into going somewhere we can't see them?" -Society
We can't have the poors, the homeless, and the unhoused dirtying up our beautiful city. - Society
Your speculation doesn't trump the massive real-world success and scientific evidence behind a housing-first approach.
You know the difference between a homeless person with mental health issues and a housed person with mental health issues? The latter has housing.
Housing is a good & necessary first step, but housing alone won't alleviate the issue entirely. I'm not sure that there's any disagreement between us.
I don't know why you worded that as if you disagree with him. He described housing-first. That's what the "first" implies - other things to support them as well as housing
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mental health
I see this floated over and over again, with the expectation that people with chronic psychological conditions just "get better" one day and go off to land cushy office jobs making six figures in an upper-middle class part of town.
If you just provide free housing, there will be a significant proportion of people who would not be able to fully benefit from it
So, this is where things get really sticky. Because we do have examples of governments with these very rigorously managed programs that host large workforces dedicated to identifying, rounding up, and rehabilitating people who get flagged as "having mental health issues".
The problem is that "mental health" often gets mixed in with "gender non-conformity", "neuro-atypical behavior", and "religious/ideological heresy". Whether you're looking at British Gender Clinics or Iranian Religious Police or Chinese Cultural apparatchiks or the American War on Woke, you have bureaucratic institutions mix the politics of the moment with the industrial scale machinery of the state.
You also run into the problem of mental health sciences being relatively new, medications carrying a host of dubious side effects, and public policymakers having very different ideas as to what a "successful" program looks like.
A lot of times, the "just give people free housing" faction sees these services as an extension of the police state that's undesirable.
I'm not advocating for "rounding up" of anyone, even though that's happening in the comments here too.
What I am primarily advocating for is:
free & non-judgemental mental health support (incl. medication), free addiction recovery programs
I've spent some (short) time volunteering for homeless people, and from my limited interactions it seemed to me that at least some of them would be open to some kind of mental health/addiction support, but it was either humiliating or impossible for them to get it. And because of that, there were some people who "chose" to be on the streets in the same way as someone "chooses" to be depressed - there's no choice involved, it's a situation the society forces the individual in by not providing the required support.
My time volunteering was in a second-world country which didn't have any government-supported free mental health services. Like, at all. If you wanted mental health support, you had to pay for it, or get really lucky (there was one NGO offering a "lottery"-type support system, and even that was just for a couple therapy sessions) - the former is impossible for a homeless person even if they had a place to sleep, the latter is really humiliating and sketchy.
Back in russia there were in theory free mental health services, but it had a terrible catch-22: in order to enroll, you needed a permanent residence, and none of the homeless shelters provide that. And then if by some miracle you managed to get on, you'd have to pay for any medications that were required, which is pretty much a non-starter.
And even in countries which do provide mental health services for the homeless, there is often stigma and judgement associated with it. The medical professionals themselves might be kind and understanding (and even then not always so), but the bureaucratic procedures required to get there can be humiliating as hell.
All this means that if you're coming from a position of homelessness, which makes it really difficult to do anything already, getting to the help can be an insurmountable challenge, either physically or mentally.
Also, after you get help and a warm place to sleep, it can feel disorienting in many ways after the street. There needs to be a robust network for helping people get up their feet (with basic supplies like food and meds provided for free at least for some time), getting people back into their local communities, and helping them find a job. It doesn't have to be a 6-figure white collar one, but even entry-level jobs can be difficult to get for an ex-homeless person for many reasons (stigma around homelessness, lack of a resume, degradation of social skills, or some really basic shit like lack of appropriate clothing) - there needs to be help associated with that, like agreements with local workplaces and support during interviews/trial periods.
Just providing housing is a good first step but it's definitely not enough. Combining it with other help multiplies the effectiveness.
Ok, I see your point. Mental health support, free housing, however, they come from the same place of wanting to actually reduce suffering. I fail to see how saying homeless people are criminals helps at all.
they come from the same place of wanting to actually reduce suffering
I think there is a selfish argument to be made for fully supporting the homeless. Giving them housing and mental health/addiction support reduces crime. It also allows many of them to work and contribute to the economy, which also means paying taxes
Housing is also much cheaper than jail or mental institutions where many homeless end up eventually, saving tax payers money
The altruistic argument is enough for me, but not for others. It's those people we need to convince, and a selfish argument would be far more effective on them. Show someone they can benefit from it, and few will disagree
The impossible ones to convince are the ones that benefit from high homeless populations, such as billionaires. Homeless make a nice distraction for them to scapegoat as the cause of societal issues
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Many don't want it because of mental illness, what is more important is medical and mental help that won't put them in further debt.
Really it's the strings attached to "free" housing. Like loss of belongings, sobriety requirements, curfews, etc. Things that are hard to tolerate when you do not have resources.
Exactly. Start by not making homeless people jump through any moral more moralistic hoops than you ask home owners to jump through.
Housing First is the most important. Can't really assist with any addiction if they don't have their own private living space.
It's way easier and (initially) cheaper to criminalize it and strut around saying you fixed the issue than actually dealing with the circumstances that cause the problem and roll out solutions that'll only see result in the next election cycle.
I live in an area with extreme high homeless population but we've all noticed over the past year that homeless people who had become familiar faces for years, are no longer there. They're simply gone. Many of us speculate there is an unpublicized "ICE" type of program but directed at the homeless, the homeless are abducted by appointed govt workers and taken to another location and goodness knows where that other location is or if they're even still alive much longer after being taken off the streets. But lemme tell ya the streets at night have been a lot emptier & quieter the past year. 😐
It's tough because many situations are different and reasons why someone is homeless. In this comic the guy says he got sick, so it's clear this situation a free housing solution would probably help.
In many situations there is a combined addiction and mental health issue that creates the problem. From my own experience with family, we had someone who needed help but refused it and it resulted in having them removed from the home.
People can become homeless like that and continue to refuse help and they go from friend to friend without making a change until they're friendless and homeless. The biggest issue is they don't want to accept the actual help they need but would rather just a hand out of money.
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Free housing only solves part of the problem. Homelessness is usually caused by something beyond high rent and addressing that underlying issue(s) is also necessary in the long term. Lack of mental healthcare is a common factor, as are substance abuse (often brought on due to mental health issues) or external debt.
To provide a comprehensive solution, a lot of things are required, such as:
- Free housing for homeless people to provide immediate relief.
- Support for those who are traditionally unemployable. Being homeless and without a "proper" job for a few years makes for a terrible CV; some help is necessary to avoid people falling through the cracks again.
- Better access to mental healthcare, both in terms of cost and availability. Many countries are struggling with one or both of this.
- Destigmatization of mental health issues. People won't seek help if they're too ashamed to admit they have a problem in the first place.
- Likewise, access to and destigmatization of addiction treatments.
- For the United States: Comprehensive healthcare reform to eliminate medical debt as a concept.
The nice thing is that each of those by themselves already help. There's no need to wait for the perfect solution; solving this piecemeal is effective.
and even if you provide all of that, there is a subset of the population that will prefer to remain homeless. within homeless communities there is often an identity and a pride. it's not all shame.
some would rather be a big shot in the homeless community than an nobody in a low wage job.
So others have poined out that it isn't that simple. And I agree with everything they said. So no need to repeat it. But after all that, there will still be people who just don't want any restrictions no matter how reasonable. Like not screaming at the top of thier lungs at 1am. Not a large group, but they will always exist. So you can't "solve" homelessness. You can olny solve involuntary homelessness.
Now here is the current state. Involuntary homelessness hasn't been dealt with for a long time. And one effect is that a lot of people who are currently homeless are unrecoverably mentally ill. Current medical science just can't repair the damage that's been done. This group is now similar to the group I mentioned above in that they don't want or can't handle the normal restrictions of just living around other people.
So while the solutions mentioned can help some homeless people, and more importantly can drastically reduce "new" homeless people. We still have the current unrepairable homeless people to work with. And they will not go willingly to any kind of help. So, do we force them to get help? That requires laws for them to break so they can be forced into treatment. Now I am not saying that is happening anywhere, because I don't think it is. And as far as I know, there isn't a place that has the mental health services capacity to help them if they tried. But in the long run, it will be a required part of the solution... eventually. If we as a society ever get serious about solving the problem.
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