I was thinking this morning of when I first became class conscious.
For several weeks I volunteered to serve meals to people experiencing homelessness. Afterwards, I volunteered at a charity dinner soliciting donations from wealthy patrons where the level of opulence and disconnect was staggering to me.
The dinner was hosted at a private estate where they owned more than a dozen cars and 5 houses for a family of 7. This was fewer than 5 miles outside of a city with overflowing shelters and people freezing to death. Here was all the wealth needed to provide homes to every person presently surviving in a shelter, and it was squandered in the hands of people entirely detached and unaware of the scope of the problem. In their minds, through petty charity they could live with a clean conscious believing they’d done their part.
The egregiousness of the disparity, the obliviousness of our guests, and their astonishing reluctance to donate left me furious for days. My own hypocrisy left me feeling crushed and crumpled inside for much longer.
I strongly suspect that the majority of homeless (say 51%-65%) do not wish to be homeless and would choose something other than panhandling and whatnot, given the clear opportunity. I also suspect that, if for no other reason than that it would be a good electioneering claim, that some politicians somewhere would solve this problem if they believed it to be a tractable problem. Therefor, I conclude, that it isn’t a tractable problem. Which is bizarre, because we’re not talking about some violation of physics principles or whatever. Build a house, or even just a room, and a homeless person isn’t homeless.
So, from that I take that the intractable nature of homelessness must be some sort of sociological phenomenon. And it turns out that it is! The reason homelessness isn’t solved in some districts, regions, and cities (even if politicians elsewhere would just be indifferent to the problem), is because when homelessness is solved in one area but not another, the number of homeless people increases there rather than decreases.
The homeless aren’t chained to the ground where they are now. And they aren’t stupid either. If they heard of a magical place where homelessness is solved, they would go there. They’d panhandle for a bus ticket fare, or they’d hitchhike. If they had no other choice, they’d hoof it.
And now a program that solved homelessness for 150 people has 4000 of them, and not enough money but for the 150.
Politicians aren’t stupid either (whatever else one might say about them). In the back of their mind, they know that solving homelessness actually attracts more homeless to their city, to their county. And that instead of solving the problem and looking like a hero (maybe even becoming a viable presidential candidate), they will end up with more homelessness than before and it will tank their career. And so, instead of “solving” it, they just give lip service to the idea and pass the buck.
This is a game theory problem. Anyone not looking to solve the game theory problem will never end homelessness.