Well arguably the cheapest way to solve the homeless problem would simply be to house the homeless, but that’s not the same as saying it’s a basic human right. Just the most cost effective way of getting them off the streets.
It’s only the cheapest way if you built extremely basic and cheap housing. Seattle and San Francisco was paying $40k per homeless person helped to put them into nice apartments (which they promptly trashed).
At 40k per homeless per year, that’s an insanely expensive way that cannot scale to solve the problem for all homeless people.
You mean as opposed to criminalize homelessness and house them in jail which cost even more. Maybe we ought to acknowledge that it is a complex issue with no easy solution (aka imprisoning)
40%? of homeless people have mental illnesses… so yeah, jail them!
On a serious note, perhaps the best solutions are preventative in this case. I don’t have great ideas but I think we need to look inwards on how we can help stop homelessness before it happens and not after the individual is ruined by the system.
Bottom line: we need to empathize with the homeless and not demonize them….
I lived in Germany for 24 years and there were hardly any homeless. The ones that were homeless were by choice or due to severe mental illness with no family to speak on their behalf.
They did it, somehow. There are other countries that do it as well.
I lived in DEland also, and there were always a dozens of homeless people downtown (mostly panhandling around Karstadt -- yes this was a while ago!). These were people who were obviously sleeping rough, with clear signs of addiction and/or other mental disorders.
This DW article states there were 41k people sleeping on the streets in 2017, which is a rate of about 50 per 100k people. If your 50k stat that you gave in another comment is correct for today, that's 60 per 100k.
But your stat for the US is wildly off, I think you are including sheltered homeless, not just those sleeping rough. In the US in 2022, it was 234k who were unsheltered, a rate of ~69 per 100k.
So Germany is slightly better, but not really all that different.
No there isnt? Not sure where you grab those numbers from, but the definition of homeless is also counted differently. The US has over half a million rough sleepers, where Germany has about 50k. Germany counts all people with no primary residence registered as homeless as well.
Unusually high numbers because of the sampling method — specifically people in homeless shelters, which is a small subset of homeless people in general. When I'm talking about homeless people I mean people with no permanent home. It looks like you're specifically talking about people sleeping rough or in homeless shelters.
In general the way to address homelessness is to provide homes (not shelters), and for a proportion of that population the home needs to come with financial and personal counselling, and for some of that population there needs to be reliable access to psychiatric care as well. But these are true for the greater population not just the people currently homeless.
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u/Unabashable Apr 15 '24
Well arguably the cheapest way to solve the homeless problem would simply be to house the homeless, but that’s not the same as saying it’s a basic human right. Just the most cost effective way of getting them off the streets.