Obviously the system should be fixed and charity isn’t a solution, but wouldn’t it be cool if a wealthy person or organization or “company” just bought all these houses to solve homelessness?
Well they could fix it in 2 years by this logic
That’s assuming that there’s no such buildings already. That assumption would be extremely incorrect.
Mhhh true. But is this known? At least where I live the municipalities have no real overview over this…
Almost every Realty website I know of will show you how long a house has been on the market, and we could also get data from insurers because you are supposed to let your insurance know if a home is vacant obviously I’m sure some people don’t but it would cause them to look into it more and NAB them on that too
Alright, I am convinced! When do we start?
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Unused housing should be taxed mercilessly.
And single-family homes should have a 100% annual tax on them, unless they are owned by an individual human/family (none of this LLC bullshit) who own only 1 house. Make a 6-month exception for inherited houses just so they can be sold, but otherwise just tax the shit out of them.
Make hoarding housing a liability.
I like that this idea also punishes single family home owners for hoarding land. You could build a ton of apartments on a single American-sized sfh lot.
That assumes that all land is taxed at a similar value. However my property at 1/5 of an acre in town is worth more than a standard suburban acreage.
I think this continues to discourage living in higher density downtowns where there is walkability and transit, while enocuraging sprawl because large single family suburban lots are cheaper so have lower tax
I don’t see that it does that. What do you mean?
Disagree, my grandfather’s home has set vacant for nearly 4 years now after his passing. The estate cannot be wrapped up due to my estranged uncle not believing the property is worthless.
The county keeps upping the tax assessment, and so he’s convinced it’s worth something and refuses to visit the preoperty.
On paper this is an unused house in reality the roof finally fell in about 6 months after my grandfather died. The county refuses to condem it because they want the tax revenue and my estranged uncle has held up the estate indefinitely with unrealistic expectations.
I wouldn’t say my poor as fuck family deserve a 100% annual tax on the assessed value of a near worthless asset.
On the contrary, a 100% yearly tax from the assesed value of the property, enacted after the property is vacant for 12 months straight, would be a strong motivator for your idiot uncle to actually visit the property, and/or the rest of you to just renounce or disclaim yourselves from ownership of what you described as a near worthless asset, and then let your idiot uncle eat 100% of the improperly assessed value’s vacancy tax.
Elsewhere in this thread you state the house is basically worthless, the land is worth 40k… but idiot uncle thinks both the land and house are worth 200k together, if I read your right.
Organize everyone other than idiot uncle into a plan to disclaim themselves from the inherited property provided the uncle ponies up 40k ( or maybe more if your idiot uncle can be duped into such ), so your parents in the trailer can just buy another plot to park their mobile home, and idiot uncle can deal with his idiocy.
I mean, that seems to be a reasonable plan with or without the proposed vacant property tax, unless there are more complications between the … non idiot uncle parties to the estate.
I don’t know for certain of course as I don’t know your locale, but… you could probably find another plot of land for about 40k?
Idiot uncle thinks its worth over 4x that, so… from his perspective, this would be a steal, to basically gain sole ownership? Let him deal with selling or demo/refurbing the house/land.
… Or have ya’ll already tried something like this, and idiot uncle refused?
What if it caught on fire? An insurance company won’t insure a house without a roof. It has zero value as it is. The land it sits on is still worth something. You should have it appraised with the collapsed roof and see if your taxes go down.
I don’t know your country’s laws, but where I live, if it’s not inhabitable it is taxed way lower (and without a roof, it’s definitely not inhabitable)
That’s how it should be, but the county refuses to deem it uninhabitable. They like their tax revenue
I imagine the options would be to pay the tax or just, I dunno, get rid of the property? You said it’s worthless.
I mean, he plainly explained that there’s a son bogging down the estate over the house. He might have said “worthless” but I’m sure it’s more like some land value and essentially zero structure value, so they might want to get a few thousand, while he blocks that transaction holding out for ten-fold. He also asserts the county tax assessments are not consistent with market value, and I think most people who have dealt with tax assessments can relate to the disconnect between realistic market value and tax assessment, one way or the other.
Or even if they did say “fine, you know what, take the property and we’ll take the rest and you can deal with trying to extract the value you think there is”, if he doesn’t agree to that you can’t really force it short of fully disclaiming yourself out of the entire estate. So if the man had $200k in other assets, then that would be an expensive thing to forfeit for the sake of not dealing with a busted house on a bit of land.
The house is, the land does has some value even after demolition costs. Basically uncle thinks it’s worth 200,000. In reality it’s worth 40,000, maybe a bit less.
Also my parents have their trailer (does not belong to the estate) on the property. They’d love to settle it, but 1 party refuses.
This plan would actually make my parents homeless as they can’t afford to purchase anything else or rent anywhere near where they live. If they could at least divide the proceeds of the land sale they might be able to afford something. This proposed tax would break them
Based on my experience, you managed to described like every rural estate situation I’ve ever seen. Household living on a trailer towed onto their parents land. That household probably doing a lot to take care of their parents. Then the parents die and suddenly some relative no one has heard from in decades comes along to really screw things up, often from an urban area with zero concept of the market realities of a poorly mantained house on rural land.
I get the whole “hoarding sucks” but it’s really only an urban problem. Go to a rural area and you can find plenty of housing stock for cheap.
It’s a common problem with estates though even if 4/5 people want to sell it for whatever they can get, that 1 person can keep it in limbo for a very long time. If there wasn’t a will or trust that explicitly gave someone power (and even if there is in some cases), a few years of nothing happening isn’t actually outside the norm.
Sadly, even with a will it can take years to resolve ownership of property after a death.
I’m not familiar with estate law, but seeing as you state your family is living on a trailer on the land, seems like either there’d be an exception (I don’t see how having essentially unused rooms on a plot of land would be a problem) or there’s some other stuff going on. Maybe if they’re not paying into the estate to rent the land that’d be an issue, but I have no idea how that works for land held in an estate. I wonder if 100% tax would incentivize him to sell? One way or the other either he sells or the land is repossessed because presumably the estate would not be able to cover the tax.
He’s a very stubborn man, and very convinced an asset he’s never seen has tremendous worth. He was apparently very disappointed that my grandfather only had $100 in his checking.
In this proposed scenario, if he does nothing he loses some money (he’s doing pretty well), but then my parents become homeless through his inaction. That seems wrong.
My family lives on the land yes, but ownership of the land belongs only to the estate. No issue with a rent payment since there was never a rent payment prior to my grandfather’s death.
If your family is living on the property I still don’t understand how this applies? The land is in use, occupied by your family, and is not vacant. If it’s zoned for single family, and a single family lives there, it’s not vacant? As far as them not paying rent now, not really sure how that happens, seeing as the land is now owned by the estate, and they are livening on it for free(?). I’m not sure how that’s not just legally considered squatting, unless there’s an agreement for use of the land provided they maintain it in the interim, but again, not an estate lawyer, nor do I know anything about property stuff. But yea, pretty sure the proposal is not relevant to your situation. It’s like considering a property with a mother in law suite vacant unless there suite is also occupied. That’s not the way it would work.
My grandfather’s home is vacant, my parents live in a separate trailer on the property. So that’s the crux isn’t it, what does vacancy mean? Because on paper this property has an occupied trailer and an unoccupied single family home. It’s one “property” but the trailer and home are taxed separately by the county and owned by different people. The county does consider them seperate dwellings, unlike a mother-in-law suite.
The estate lawyer has made it clear there are no issues from my parents living on the property still and there is no expectations of payment. It’s definently not squatting, 50% of the estate does belong to my parents after all.
Thank you for that information. Who would have guessed estate/property law is complicated. I would still suggest there are solutions to this sort of situation than can be reasonably addressed while still honoring the main purpose of the proposal, but I obviously would not be the person to speak on them.
Good luck to your family. I’m sorry you’re dealing with that.
If 50% of the estate belongs to your parents and there’s already a tax entity for the trailer, then in this example they would go to forced arbitration to draw up their portion of the land ownership and get their single family tax rebate, and the other half of the property would be the part that starts getting a vacancy tax. I’d imagine with a timeline like six months there’d be a whole lot of arbitrations in the short term to settle existing arrangements like this one. Honestly I’m curious what the land ownership looks like already for the trailer - if they can legally stay on the estate then there must be a portion of the ground that already legally belongs to them.
No part of the land is directly owned by my parents. It is owned by the estate, which is 50/50 between my parent and my uncle. Trust me if my parents owned the land under their trailer they would be a lot less stressed.
Like I said them continuing to live there is not an issue. Maybe if my uncle pressed it it would become one, but all he wants is 100k +. So he really doesn’t care beyond that.
Unfortunately his wants aren’t compatible with the reality of the situation.
No one has pursued a forced arbitration, and honestly I’m not sure why. Per the lawyer it seems like the property can exist in limbo indefinitely, or at least until one party forces something. It’s a weird stalemate of unrealistic expectations. He wants a lot of money, but also doesn’t want to pay a lawyer himself or do any work. As long as this continues my parents keep their home at least.
6 months to offload a house is not always so easy.
I did a search around the area I grew up that is very rural and I checked 4 properties for sale, two of them under $100k and they’ve been listed for over a year. In urban areas there’s demand, but rural areas commonly have houses just no one wants on land that no one cares about. No distant LLCs want them so they are available, but they aren’t convenient to anything so no one wants them either.
That means they aren’t worth 100k. Forcing people to sell them for their actual value will lower real estate prices nationwide.
There are many cases where you just can’t reduce prices enough to make them sell
- my higher priced town paid Pennies on the dollar for a complex that used to be a mental hospital and housing for various challenged. No developer was willing to pay anything because of lead and asbestos remediation costs. My town was hoping to get EPA funds and didn’t so is saddled with unusable property that it also can’t afford to clean up
- the town I grew up in has been declining for decades. Many houses are well below the cost of cars but still no one willing or able to buy. Last time I checked there seemed to be a floor at $5k but there were multiple habitable houses for $5k, and no buyers
If they’re not worth any money, then the tax burden of sitting on them shouldn’t be high enough to be a problem. But if it is, you can sell them cheap, abandon them to government auction, replat them with neighboring cheap lots do make ag land or a large lot for an industrial or multifamily development, or more.
“I can’t make a bunch of money selling or renting this lot” is not an excuse to just sit on land waiting for the value to go up.
Pricing of homes in food deserts has pretty much zero impact on the housing that could actually help low-income individuals.
The housing situation and relative benefits (and lack therof) to house residents in rural areas is just fundamentally distinct from the urban situation.
So those who want to buy a house but can’t afford it are still fucked. Cool.
When more homeless people are in public housing, there’s less demand for rentals.
When there’s less demand for rentals, competition falls and rents fall too.
When rents are low, landlording becomes less profitable.
When landlording isn’t profitable, investors move their stock to higher growth assets.
When investors sell their houses, the price to buy a house falls.
To put this in simple terms: a rising tide lifts all ships. Housing the homeless improves the lives of everyone except landlords and billionaires.
That’s great in the short term, but now no one is ever gonna build housing again, so in a generation we’re back to a housing shortage.
If you exclusively try to bring down housing costs by attempting to limit demand, you end up making the problem worse. You need to offer more supply.
Nationalized housing and construction.
That could work, but government run housing tends to become a ghetto, historically.
Thats a symptom not a cause. Gov. Housing usual is used by ppl in poverty. Not the other way around.
That doesn’t change the fact that it seems to happen almost every time.
Ok, but it doesn’t change the fact that it tends to happen almost every time.
i think you mean investor will ever build housing again. Regular people still want nice houses, so we will be back to craft houses built by individuals wishing to express themselves into the abode they live in. To fill the gaps grants can be issues to aid construction for those less well off
So nothing but a sea of suburban sprawl to every horizon? That sounds like hell.
You’re comparing apples and oranges. The apples being the capitalist housing market, and the oranges being the entire housing economy. Across the entire housing economy, demand is the same. It’s just that more of the demand is being met by socialised supply. So no, in terms of the entire housing supply, this proposal doesn’t limit demand.
Across the entire housing economy, demand is the same.
Not over time. Population goes up, and also becomes more concentrated.
The demand for housing isn’t being limited though. The demand for investment property has decreased to be replaced with demand for owned housing. You can still sell a new house. People are still buying houses. I agree with others that worse case, we can bolster development at the federal level, but that doesn’t seem like it will be necessary. Additionally, with declining birth rates and an increase in WFH jobs, less housing will be needed, and people are moving to areas where new construction is not as needed as they are moving into previously abandoned/vacant rural areas. So you won’t be seeing new housing developments there so much as rebuilding.
Your paradigm is in no way connected to the reality of how people are moving. New home construction is going up like crazy in the small cities and towns people move into. To expect a small area to absorb a 50% population increase with little new construction is just not realistic.
And to expect renting to just…end? That sounds like a crazy level of privileged bubble. A huge fraction of the population is not and never will be able to afford homeownership, and expecting the government to fund their home purchases would bankrupt any nation.
In my comment I explicitly stated that there is no need to stop new construction. I do not expect any area to absorb anything. I suggested construction will continue and “additionally” that some areas are being revitalized and will have different needs (rebuilding vs new homes). That’s just true.
I’m not expecting renting to just end. I know people who do not want to own any kind of property and prefer short term rentals. It’s not a sensible goal to force people into owning if they don’t want to.
What does it mean to not be able to afford home ownership? Do you mean they not have enough money for housing in the first place, or do you mean they can just rent? If option one, they are considered homeless and the state should provide housing, if option two, then yes, rent to own should be a real thing. First time home buyers loans exist and the project should be expanded. These are not novel proposals that I just made up. People have been suggesting them for quite a while.
Yeah but expanding those programs on the order you’re talking about is absurd levels of money. Not to mention the credit risks…unless you’re suggesting the government act as guarantee, in which case we’ll have a student loan scenario. Home prices will just rise to whatever they were before, plus the government grant.
- the government has absurd levels of money
- it will literally earn the government money long term
- it’s not like it’ll happen overnight
- it’s not a grant it’s a loan. The loan would be for the entire amount. This is already basically in place in a different country.
- prices would not skyrocket because there would be virtually no rental market so if you wanted to sell you’re selling to someone who is going to occupy. Homes will not be investments the way they are currently seen. This will be a way for people currently in a position to only rent to start getting equity so they can have better opportunities in the future. Selling to upgrade will be done because a) you started earning more b) because you had a period with no payments and therefore were able to save c) originally purchased below your means. There will be inflation, but generally no one will be moving into a home for 500k and selling 2-3 years later for a million. There won’t be enough buyers once investors are mostly disincentivized/removed from the market
You mean like it bankrupted the Soviet Union when they built all that public housing?
Is the government going to give them a car too? What good is a house to a person that has no transportation. How are they going to get to/from anywhere with how most neighborhoods are set up? There’s nothing in walking distance for them. A better solution would be for the government to tax the shit out of residential property that the owner isn’t living in so they’re incentivized to sell. Then the people that are currently renting can buy, move out of their apartments in more walkable areas and free them up for whatever the government needs to do for the homeless.
Lots of homeless people have cars. Often, they live in them. That said, it would be better for them to get to work by walking, cycling, or using public transportation.
This. Thank you.
Qui-Gon explained it best:
You and the Naboo form a symbiont circle. What happens to one of you will affect the other. You must understand this.
I think it’s valid to address issues with proposed solutions, especially prior to their implementation. For what it’s worth, their argument is not entirely sound, since most these proposals have built in subsidies for home buyers, but it’s good that they are providing their perspective.
Their “issue” is that they think it doesn’t benefit them personally, and they think everything ought to be about them.
I mean, it’s not just them in that situation, and it seems uncharitable to claim their only concern is self interest. I stand by my original point that it’s important people speak up about how situations affect them, and I’m not sure I’d call that self interested. Since I don’t know them personally, I’ll give the benefit of the doubt. Housing as a right is a cornerstone of leftist ideology, so I want to make sure people feel comfortable talking about it openly and debating implementation and bringing up when people might be left behind.
Based I think the same thing should be done to retail stores. If you can’t get people to rent it. Force a sale of the building
This is something I find baffling.
In my city, it’s generally a hotspot with dramatically increasing real estate costs and high occupancy, generally.
Except this one road, which has all sorts of vacant retail, with different owners, with thriving retail and/or residential pretty much everywhere around it. Even the gas stations are 50c a gallon cheaper there then going a mile north or south of it. I have no idea why that one road is different and looking like a dying city while being surrounded by exactly the opposite.
Retail stores are dying because of cars. Every time the data shows: parking spaces decrease business, bike lanes and train stations increase it.
Stores are failing because the land they’re on isn’t useful. Cars have poisoned it.
While I’m all for making it harder to just sit on housing, the “more empty homes than homeless” this, while technically true, is very misleading, and I wouldn’t want to try to force unhoused folks into the empty homes without a lot more pruning.
In-demand places don’t typically have much in the way of empty homes, as it doesn’t typically make financial sense not to rent them out. Empty homes in places like this are generally in between tenants or on the market to be sold. Meanwhile, there are places with huge numbers of empty homes, typically because of population drain. The homes sit empty not because someone’s hoarding them, but because people don’t want to move to places like Cairo, Illinois.
The statistic, whilst technically true, doesn’t take into account demographic and population changes. People want to live in places with vibrant economies and lots of job opportunities, and that’s not typically where the huge supply of empty homes is. So we can’t just redistribute our way out of this problem. Building, and especially infill in cities, is absolutely necessary in huge quantities.
People want to live in places with vibrant economies and lots of job opportunities
Homelessness does not exist on this tier of Maslow’s hierarchy.
Having a home is not useful if living it in means you can’t feed yourself. You can find owned, unoccupied housing that’s been on the market over a year. The owners don’t want it, but no buyers want it either. If you freely gave a homeless man one of those houses without any further aid, he’d probably abandon it because he’d have to be within reasonable distance of a city to actually be able to survive.
And Airbnb. Fuck that company and the people that buy houses and use them for this. My parents live in the mountains in a popular spot for vacations and camping. Nowadays they are the only house on their entire street that isn’t an Airbnb.
Ban corporations from owning residential properties. Houses shouldn’t be held like stocks or cryptocurrency. Only allow individuals to own a maximum of two residential properties, which must be occupied by the owner at least 5 months out of the year or be surrendered to the government, to be sold to an individual who will live in the house.
In the Netherlands we have wooncorporatie, which are non-profit home rental companies. I think it’s a reasonable model, although the center right government tried to get rid of them for years. (Now we have a coalition of far-right parties in power, and they don’t even have anything like a consistent ideology much less policy so who can know what the future brings?)
Do you think you provide housing? Here’s a list of common signs:
If someone stole all your tools, you’d kill them, and you don’t think that’s weird.
Unhealthy relationship with caffeine (bonus points for other substances too)
At least one fucked-up bone or joint
There’s some Liquid Nails or silicone caulk stuck in your favorite work shirt
Your hearing isn’t as good as it used to be
Regular porta-shitter use
If two or more of these fit your lifestyle, you may be a provider of housing.
People have vacant home??? Where?
There are 15 million vacant in the US: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/
…since gross vacancy rate is a measure of all vacant properties — including vacation properties — states with several popular tourist destinations, like Florida and Hawaii, will always register slightly higher rates. The Census Bureau notes that the largest category of vacant housing in the United States is classified as “seasonal, recreational, or occasional use.” In over one-fifth of US counties, these seasonal units made up at least 50% of the vacant housing stock.
Is the movement now to ban vacation homes?
Also note that California, with the worst housing crisis, has one of the lowest vacancy rates, while Maine, Alaska, and Hawaii have among the highest rates. There’s not a housing shortage on average, there’s a housing shortage in the places people want to live - which largely means the places where they can get jobs.
I don’t think vacation homes should be banned, just heavily taxed. I realize that not everybody who owns a vacation home is a multi-millionaire. Some people have a crappy place that’s been in the family for generations. But, they’re still doing much, much better than the people who own 0 homes.
I’m a condo super, there’s one apartment in my building that has been vacant for 5+ years and the owners i think live in Hong Kong. If someone busted in there they could squat for years
Where I live, there’s a bunch of abandoned squatter places where drug heads go to shoot up.
There’s been countless court cases of the city government trying to sue the landlords who own it. 90% of the time, the lawsuit fails because of some clause where if the landlord isn’t able to show up (because they live in a different state or a foreign investor), the court hearing gets postponed.
My city tried to pass an ordinance to remove that clause but it was shot down.
So random crack house owned by some rich asshole in California that’s next to a school doesn’t get any better for years.
Seems like the kinda thing that would get fixed with a Finnish cocktail party.
Where I live there was a super-popular local bakery. The landlord tried to get them to pay a higher rent and then kicked them out when they refused. The building has now been empty for the last five years. I do not understand the economics of this shit.
Not likely intentional, more likely a redevelopment attempt that fell through, is blocked by zoning or other red tape, or changing market conditions.
We have a similar situation on a prime location on a very active street of shops and restaurants: there’s no reason for these building to be vacant for years. However I understand they wanted to redevelop to a much bigger building and have not been able to get it re-zoned.
Right across the street a similar redevelopment effort has been a huge success with something liver 100 apartments over street level restaurants. That’s perfect for that location and we need more of it, but exceeded zoning limits. Ever since then, our town council has been dragging to slow redevelopment
I don’t understand that either! Sometimes I think people are so numerally illiterate and emotionally butthurt that they completely disregard carrying and opportunity costs.
We need to strengthen adverse possession laws. Adverse possession, aka squatter’s rights, were intended for this exact problem. Adverse possession laws were very popular in the 19th century in the American west. In western states, there was a problem. Speculators out east would buy up undeveloped parcels and hoard them for investment purposes. They might buy up a piece of land in rural Kansas. They would wait until homesteaders moved in nearby, worked and built up their own farms. Then the speculators would sell. This was a way for lazy speculators to profit off the hard work of yeoman farmers.
So states passed adverse possession laws. The idea was that if you cared so little for a property that you don’t even notice someone openly living on it for 7 years or so, then really, you don’t deserve to own that property. There is only so much land on this Earth. We need to be good stewards of our finite land; especially if we’re taking that land from its natural state.
We need to strengthen and expand these laws. I would set adverse possession for condos and houses maybe to just three years. We have a severe housing shortage, we cannot afford to let units sit completely unused and wasted. If you own so much property, and care for it so little, that someone can live there for three years without you even noticing? Sorry. Use it or lose it.
Private property is a social contract. We agree to respect private property rights, because we have found through generations that a system based on private property produces a lot of benefits to society. But private property is not some absolute natural right. If you are going to own property to exclusion of everyone else, it is reasonable for you to be required to use that property productively. Why should we bother protecting the property rights of those who are using property in such destructive and anti-social ways like using vacant properties for speculation purposes?
All that would do is increase demand for security guards and expand their services to checking on residential properties the parasite class own.
That sounds like a bonus. Either way it’s distributing some amount of wealth and making it more expensive to be a deadbeat landlord.
That’s terrible. You should post the address and unit number so everyone knows to stay away from it.
Just apply a 300% tax on empty property. Empty houses don’t contribute to the local economy by using local businesses.
How would this help house homeless people?
People using homes as an asset (the same way they buy stocks/etc) would panic realizing that their golden goose is suddenly draining their bank account. They’d either offer rental prices dirt cheap, or give up and sell the property at whatever price people can afford (eg, 10% of what they currently charge).
There are currently MANY empty properties so this could have a larger effect than we often realize. Currently some cities try this the inverse way by giving tax credit to residents.
Prices are artificially inflated due to reduced supply. Increased supply should lower cost * making homes more affordable.
- Absent other fuckery
I’d hope that it would encourage renting the unit even at a discount to avoid the fine.
Which would in turn lower rents by the surge of units on the market for rent.
It’s a compromise, from the before times when one could assume people elected to their public positions where attempting to do those jobs in good faith.
The idea would be to give everyone something they want so that everyone could agree and actually get something done.
In this case, the house hoarders don’t immediately lose the resources they’ve hoarded, and instead get charged for the damage they’re doing to the economy. Ideally that money goes towards housing the poor, but that’s a side effect.
The point would be to make house hoarding non-viable as an income source, incentivising the hoarders to un-hoard.
Sadly, it wouldn’t do either without a much higher tax, which would never get agreed to
Nowadays it’s just a pipe dream that the money’d power wants to compromise on anything.
The Welsh (or some Welsh councils?) have already done it. Although the problem there is more with holiday homes people buy and leave empty most of the year. It’s fun to read people complaining that they have to sell it. Yes, that is the point.
Canada instantly bursting in flames
why do you hate me so?
The current federal government? This is about the United States Federal Government?
LOL, nope don’t trust them.
They’ll seize the houses of “smaller” landlords and give them to the 1% rich landlords, and their houses would be exempt from the regulations. Then they will raise the rent even more, and this time, they will actually have good lawyers, and the tenants will lose every time.
The government needs to be fixed before we can even attempt to fix other issues.
This government would seize housing, then deny access to people of color, LGBT people, people with disabilities (yes the ADA exist, but fascists ignore laws), probably anyone who ever voted registered as a democrat, and anyone else critical of the regime.
This would have to be done at the state level anyway since they enforce most of the real estate laws.
Even if we build cheap apartments for the homeless and fully fund it with tax payer money it actually saves tax payer money and gets the homeless out of the already over stressed healthcare system.
Most homeless are in and out of the hospital for easily preventable diagnosis that is a direct result of living on the street. This would free up a bed in the ED, free up a bed in acute care if admitted, and free up urgent care and other EMT resources.
This has been studied for YEARS. We know the answer to directly solving this without even trying to fix the other systemic issues at play here.
However, having a homeless population is good for capitalism. It’s an area where an employer can point to and say, “If you don’t work for pennies on the dollar, you’ll end up there.”
Seriously. I think the solution to the homeless crisis is to build what amounts to government-funded dorms for adults. 2-3 people to a room; literally just like a college dorm. Basic shelter for anyone who needs it, but a degree of privacy you don’t get with homeless shelters. You have roommates, but only one or two, and you get a place to safely store things. And the price would be affordable enough that the state can provide this shelter for anyone who needs it.
And a final benefit of this kind of spartan housing arrangements is that you can ensure only those who need it will take advantage of it. You don’t need to go to elaborate lengths to verify eligibility. You don’t need to have harsh income-based cutoffs. Most people do not want to live in a dorm room their whole life. That alone will ensure that only those who really need it will seek it out.
You have roommates, but only one or two, and you get a place to safely store things.
These clauses are mutually exclusive. Has to be accessible only by one tenant for actual privacy and security, that’s one of the complaints against existing shelters. Also, “make the housing just shitty enough that it might be better than sleeping outside” as a replacement for means-testing and incentive not to rely on it is diarespectful. Just provide standard studio apartments, tiny homes, or literally whatever vacant property is available and stop trying to find the minimum acceptable dehumanizing conditions.
I don’t think asking homeless people to live in the same conditions college students all across the country live in is unacceptable or dehumanizing. And yes, you can have some degree of privacy. Having one or two long term roommates is a world apart from sleeping in a big room with dozens of strangers. It is disrespectful to every person who has ever lived in a college dorm to say that such housing is unacceptable or subpar.
You’re letting perfect be the enemy of the good, and you’re ignoring the actual politics of getting this kind of broad program passed. This is the kind of program that could actually gain political traction in an American political context. Giving anyone who wants one a tiny home or condo is not going to be viable. You can’t offer people free accommodations that are superior to those that a substantial portion of the electorate enjoys, not if you want to win office.
And resources fundamentally are limited. Yes, it would be great to buy everyone a three bedroom single family house. But that’s just not viable financially. Offering people a shelter of last resort, so no on ever has to sleep on the street again? That’s something that can be done, but only if you actually control the costs. And dorm-type housing can be built for a fraction of the cost of apartment-type housing, simply because the space is shared.
Most college students are, functionally if not legally, still children. And dormitories are an efficient way to provide housing for a large group in a concentrated area. Neither case can or should apply broadly to the unhoused.
Sharing space with a stranger is a great way to get robbed or just made uncomfortable with no recourse. Students have RAs and can apply to live alone, off-campus, or swap dorms. Your theoretical slumblock going to have that flexibility? Nevermind that a single-purpose housing complex is just an instant ghetto. Best outcomes come from integration, not segregation.
The current American political climate is fucking hostile and watering down any movement to try and fit in is the wrong call. It’s like haggling by starting with concessions. And why couldn’t it be viable? It isn’t luxury housing I support. Most people have some amount of personal pride and don’t want to subsist on welfare if they have another option, and I’m perfectly happy to let some people permanently use those properties if it lessens the strain on public resources for everyone else.
Letting people suffer just to get (re)elected is intolerable.
Reources are artificially limited. There are more vacant houses in this country than homeless people. We don’t need to build new complexes to sweep the problem into one neat pile, just start seizing vacant lots held by absent investors. It wouod be cheaper than the police and medical costs we’re currently paying. Ideally pair this radical housing initiative with job training programs, optional rehab/drug counseling, mental healthcare, and other slightly-left-of-global-center communist ideas.
One little problem you aren’t accounting for.
Give houses to newcomers for not being self sufficient, then you’ll be attracting even more newcomers. The cycle continues.
Now, with 2nd generation immigrants, this is a good investment. Especially in aging countries such as mine.
But yeah you’re not taking in future expenses into account with your idea there.
The current amount of homeless, are there to scarecrow the potential amount of homeless away.
It’s more sane, as a society, to reduce this to refugees only.
Giving economic immigrants a free house… that’s just insane
I am accounting for newcomers and not being self sufficient.
In the studies and actual use cases where places have done this the homeless person is getting a 300-500sqft apartment. It’s enough to get off the street have a clean bed and running water. They can then get a job and work their way out.
The reason this works is because once you have a decent income and want to start enjoying life you can’t do that in a 300-500sqft apartment.
This isn’t just shit I’m making up, there have been cities that have done this and it fucking works.
Can you link the source then, thanks
I can provide a few, but honestly so many cities have done this, tried to do part of it and failed/succeeded, or are working on plans to do this. Portland Oregon for example had success with a homeless program that puts people in little 15x15ft sheds. It’s not much, but it’s a start and some have moved on to their own apartment. Years ago a city in Utah (I think), built a small apartment and did a study to determine it was more cost effective to provide housing than let them clog up the Healthcare and EMS resources.
One study found an average cost savings on emergency services of $31,545 per person housed in a Housing First program over the course of two years. Another study showed that a Housing First program could cost up to $23,000 less per consumer per year than a shelter program.
- Housing First
- Coalition for the Homeless
- PBS article comparing two cities
- National Alliance to End Homelessness
Here is a list of studies from the last link. Each pebble is a study with links and sources
Again, this is not something I’m just saying or making up. This has hard data backed evidence to support it.
Those 31,5k USD saved is because you don’t let them die.
My source is comparing first generation non EU immigrants their taxes to the social transfers they receive. It’s a net loss.
As I stated, it’s the 2nd generation where it’s at.
Those are the worker bees.
If these people were self sufficient then they wouldn’t have been homeless. It takes massive investments. And guess what? It pays off in the 2nd generation.
Okay, so don’t read any of the sources and stay ignorant. Homelessness can be a result of a multitude of factors and not all of them are only illegal immigrants who can’t be self-sufficient.
No where in any of the sources does it say the cost saved was because “they didn’t die”. It’s clear this goes far beyond your ability to understand and comprehend complex systems of cost analysis. You ask for sources then ignore them. Get bent.
The 31,5k USD was because of emergency services lol. What do you think emergency services are? Goes to hospital. By law cannot be refused treatment. It’s expensive.
Being housed prevents needing those medical services that cannot be refused. Hence it’s cheaper to house someone.
The cheapest option is to let them die.
Social housing isn’t about getting people to be self sufficient. It’s just about giving them a comfortable life.
The return on investment comes from their children. Not the parents.
if you want to show a source that it’s good for the economy. Then show one where the person’s taxes outweigh their social transfers.
Which is difficult to do for older people. They need investments, then they do low paying jobs. The difference between their low paying jobs and doing nothing is basically the same amount of income.
So they don’t have much motivation. Their income during their work life is low, then they get a pension. Net loss for government.
Their kids however. They went to school at a young age, get higher education. They get a well paying job. Very profitable.
We have social housing here in Belgium, you get it after waiting 2 years. Which means… only the chronic low income people get it. They usually die in it. Cheap rent.
Here you don’t become homeless easily. You have unemployment benefits. You don’t get medical bankruptcy. You get living wage. Blablabla
Temporary income shocks are completely taken by social security. These people don’t get social housing because they can just continue paying their mortgage or rent.
So you already need to take these people out of your studies. Because yeah, giving housing to short term homeless people will be very beneficial. They just are in-between jobs.
Now, the ones that have social housing, there’s something wrong there. They aren’t self sufficient because of chronic reasons. These people will worsen the results of your studies.
It’s like looking at immigration studies and including the EU immigrants with the non EU immigrants. While one part obviously scores better than the other.
Nobody was talking about immigrants before you did. Not sure what your point is.
Idk how it’s in your country but in my country the homeless are illegal immigrants
Sad that people want to go to your country, even if they will be homeless. Sad they find no compassion there.
In my country, the immigrants are very slightly less likely to be homeless. Little compassion here either.The rules are simple. If you want to be in Belgium, be self sufficient until you have nationality. Unless refugee, then you get social housing.
Most of our immigrants come through family reunification. Their family member can only get them here if he or she has enough income and housing.
They sign a paper to say that the government can deduct money from the family member’s account if the immigrant requires help from our social services for income.
Then when the immigrant requests income from the state, the residence card is lost.
If that person does not leave the country, will become an illegal immigrant. Then will likely become homeless.
The rules are there to diminish the burden on the state.
Switzerland has 30% immigrants, Singapore is all about immigrants, Dubai as well. I don’t think these places have any compassion. High cost of living. If not self sufficient, then they prefer the spot to be taken by an immigrant that will be self sufficient.
It’s selfish, but important in order to keep our country from going into a crisis.
Legal immigration is easy. My wife went to Jakarta. Got EU tourist visa. We went to city hall. I presented proof of housing, payslips of past few months, national health insurance.
We got married. She got orange card, could start working. Can’t find a job.
Then because I still have my job, my wife gets F card after 6 months.
She did 2 classes to learn Dutch. Some social integration class. Found a job that is 2/3rd subsidised by government.
All legal. It’s easy. To become an illegal immigrant, you need to do some heavy lifting.
Is it? Immigrants get jobs and pay taxes. Economic immigration can be a great economic boon if managed properly. It might be possible to generate consistent returns on investment by providing shelter, food, education and training.
A lot of economic immigrants don’t have jobs.
It’s quite difficult to get a job when everything is in a language you are at most new to.
I went to 30 headhunter firms with my wife, they all showed us the door when they realised she doesn’t speak Dutch.
Her job is cleaning. Subsidised 66% by the government (taxes). Client pays 10 euros, my wife gets 15 euros. The company gets 30 euros per hour.
She has a fucking law degree from a top 5% university in her country.
Immigration depends a lot on language, or the lingual infrastructure of the country.
2 ways. Either Belgium decides to turn English into an official language and creates an environment where English is the only language needed, or the immigrant learns Dutch.
Learning Dutch takes years.
My coworker her mom lives here for 30 years and doesn’t speak Dutch. Her aunt speaks our language fluently.
It depends on the person, but in general it’s not to be underestimated.
My wife is just going to be half time worker. Better that I work full time and that she takes care of our kid a bit more while I work full time.
My wife doesn’t pay any taxes.
As I said priorly. The real deal here is the 2nd generation. Those can be educated in belgium for the Belgian economy. Big gains for the economy.
If I go to Indonesia, what am I gonna do lol. Idk anything about indonesian stuff. There my wife would have to be the breadwinner while I just look for a job in Singapore or an English company in Batam.
I’m bit lucky that accountancy is more globalised. Law is very specific. You’re supposed to specialise and then make that your career.
A lot of natives also don’t have jobs. Shall we kick those out too?
And if not, why do they get preferential treatment? They cost the country a lot more money than immigrants.
First of all, there wasn’t anything said about kicking people out. Just not giving them houses, in order to make the place less attractive for future immigrants that aren’t self sufficient.
Second of all. I wouldn’t give a shit if the people taking advantage of our country’s massive welfare would be kicked out.
I know plenty of people who prefer to have no money just so that they can keep enjoying social discounts and sick money/unemployment money/living wages.
These people are abled. They just don’t give A FUCK that their kids have 0 inheritance.
In a country with median net wealth of 250k euros per adult. Fucking embarrassing. Gigantic social mobility here.
Oh no, learning the language of the country you immigrate to, the horror
Make it a requirement of continuing occupancy. Must be taking classes or working. Classes are free.
Still takes years to learn the language with those classes and these classes are social transfers to the immigrants, but a good investment with return.
The requirement is neither of those things. The requirement is self sufficiency.
If you’re rich enough, then I don’t care if you don’t learn the language and that you don’t work.
You’re spending into our economy with likely passive income coming from your global investments.
Or you have family members that take care of your cost of living. All fine.
If you want to have a job, then as I priorly stated. Either in Dutch or English.
Both would work. If the infrastructure is in English, then the ability to make immigrants self sufficient becomes a lot easier. Good for our economy.
If we don’t want to do these investments, then the immigrant needs to learn Dutch.
Those are the only options.
My wife speaks English at her job. Did 2 Dutch classes. Most of the people in flanders speak English so communication goes well.
Ego of natives to be spoken to by their preferred language is economically irrelevant so I ignore that.
The premise of this discussion was economic refugees, so I assumed we were only talking about those who are not self-sufficient.
These people can’t legally enter the country as far as I’m aware. So yeah, they become homeless.
Giving money to economic refugees that aren’t self sufficient is just… at best, turning them into baby factories for next generation worker bees.
My country has an aging population, perhaps it’s beneficial? Not sure.
Actually it’s easy to see if it’s beneficial. Look at social refugees. Their kids get higher education.
There’s enough war in the world though. We don’t need economic refugees on top of the social refugees.
But then again, need to question how easy those economic refugees are to integrate.
They aren’t traumatised by war, so it should be easier.
A lot of angles to look from
That’s crazy: there are cleaners who speak the language? I thought this was a stereotypical job for immigrants because you don’t need special skills or credentials nor have to know the language. The skills are basic; you just need to work hard, be reliable and figure out how to get fast at it
The cleaners that know the language… idk mate, higher education costs 1 month’s minimum wage to fund a whole bachelor’s.
Achieving the bachelor takes effort though. The job that you get with the bachelor also is more difficult to do. More stressful.
Doesn’t really pay much more. Maybe 200 euros?
Minimum wage pays barely any taxes. While the “discount on tax” is lost as you climb the ladder.
At 3250 euros gross wage I get 2250 euros net.
At minimum wage, 2050 euros. They get 2000 euros net.
It’s not a big deal. Of course my wage will keep growing, while theirs will stagnate.
But complacency is quite the drug.
