I’d introduce a (municipal) law on homelessness in some medium-sized American city. The nature of the law would allocate some minor funding for a peculiar type of homelessness census (to occur at set intervals), and would also declare certain homeless people to be the responsibility of that municipal government while declaring the rest to be the responsibility of other local governments (municipal, county, and state) based on some rather boring criteria. Such as…
Whether or not they were born in that city, or have lived there for some significant fraction of their life
Whether they had worked in that city previously for at least 18 months of the last 5 years
Whether their mother and/or father would qualify under the same standards
Whether they had owned or rented a home in that city for 12 months of the last 5 years
Whether they had been arrested/jailed by the locals in the last 5 years (this is qualifying, not disqualifying by the way)
And so on. The details of qualification are less important than the general idea: that certain homeless people are the responsibility of the locals, and that they can’t shirk responsibility for them. But that others, migratory, are not. Even as they disqualified those homeless people, they’d also be writing up paperwork that proves they are in fact the responsibility of other local governments elsewhere.
I would expect that other nearby local governments would enact similar local laws in retaliation, so it would have a crystallization effect, and eventually most or all throughout North America would do the same. Instead of trying to shirk responsibility for this problem, they’d start to take responsibility for them… after all, it’s a much more constrained problem once you no longer worry about the solution just attracting more homeless to your city, it’s a cheaper problem, and now you’ve declared yourself to be responsible for these people when they meet some reasonable criteria.
Without this, cities like Los Angeles and New York (secretly) find it impossible to deal with it on a rational and level basis. If you spend x dollars solving the problem for y homeless, you soon have 5y homeless or 20y homeless… and you no longer have enough money to do that. And if you can anticipate this happening, you never even try in the first place.
The criteria can be designed such that 99% of homeless people would qualify somewhere. And the small remainder would then be a much smaller issue, one that we might even expect the US federal government to pick up the tab for.
I get tired of hearing about how it is a problem of compassion or lack thereof, it is 100% a game theory problem.
How is homelessness a game theory problem? It’s a capitalism problem. There’s literally millions of empty dwellings (at least in France and USA) that could be used. How about, instead of a census, simply expropriating owners of empty housing? That would be a lot easier, a lot less costly, and 100% effective at housing homeless people.
I can’t tell if you didn’t read my comment, or you’re just not very insightful. The trouble with counter-intuitive ideas is that 99% of the population navigates through life using nothing but intuition… and so they’re completely blind to it.
How is homelessness a game theory problem?
Without this, cities like Los Angeles and New York (secretly) find it impossible to deal with it on a rational and level basis. If you spend x dollars solving the problem for y homeless, you soon have 5y homeless or 20y homeless… and you no longer have enough money to do that. And if you can anticipate this happening, you never even try in the first place.
That’s how.
Though I suppose if you just ship off all the homeless to gulags, in a sense that’s a “solution” too. I can see how that would appeal to some people. But I operate from a place of “it’s not a solution if it hurts other people”.
How about, instead of a census, simply expropriating owners of empty housing? That would be a lot easier, a lot less costly
Sure. It will be less costly, if you ignore the tens of billions you’ll need to pay your soldiers doing the expropriation.
Or you could just enslave them, I guess. They’d be “free” in the Stalinist sense of the worse, really.
I was talking about some city of 250,000 spending $100,000 over the course of a few months. It’s a price tag so low even I sort of think it’s bullshit. But it’d work.
Sure. It will be less costly, if you ignore the tens of billions you’ll need to pay your soldiers doing the expropriation.
Why would requisitioning empty dwellings be complicated or require specialized infrastructure? I agree with you if we talk expropriating the wealth of our overlords, they will recruit militias and put up quite a fight. But we’re talking housing which is both really necessary for basic survival, and a very tiny portion of rich people’s wealth, so there’s two options to it:
do it quietly as has always been the case: France already had huge waves of requisitions post-WWII (it’s legal by law for the municipality or the préfecture to do it) and it didn’t create a civil war
if the owners want to put up a fight, arm the people! why would you need an army? just dismantle the police and distribute the guns and you’ll see suddenly everyone will have a house (civil war is really not my favorite option)
I was talking about some city of 250,000 spending $100,000 over the course of a few months. It’s a price tag so low even I sort of think it’s bullshit. But it’d work.
I’m talking an entire country spending ~50K$ per year to employ two locksmiths full-time to break into abandoned houses and rehouse people. Can’t beat that price tag or its result. Or even better, just instruct the police (or better yet, dismantle it) so that when people do it without any funding, they don’t get in prison for “private property violations” or whatever bullshit they come up with. We live in countries with such abundance of resources that noone would starve or sleep on the streets, were it not for the police.
All in all, i really don’t see what you sense would be wrong with requisitioning empty dwellings, or what this has to do with stalinism. (to be clear, as an anarchist i’m profoundly against central authorities, and as a squatter i don’t expect any answers from the State; i simply pointed out if they wanted to they could rehouse everyone by just snapping their fingers, and that the housing crisis is a lie just like every other capitalist “crisis”)
Why would requisitioning empty dwellings be complicated or require specialized infrastructure?
Because when you requisition those empty dwellings and the owners refuse, you will need a large mechanized infantry to tell them that their refusals are irrelevant. Within the United States, the police authorities might substitute as that infantry, but do you have much confidence on them obeying? Even if they work, they’re hardly cheap. So instead, you go with some cannibalized portion of the US military, but they clock in at something like $0.8 trillion per year… does anyone think of that as inexpensive?
So, specialized? Dunno. But definitely non-cheap infrastructure.
But we’re talking housing which is both really necessary for basic survival, and a very tiny portion of rich people’s wealth,
Of true wealth, real estate comprises the bulk of it. Sure, Bezos (and most of the rest) have the vast portion of their wealth as stock/equity in various businesses… but that was never true wealth anyway. That’s imbeciles speculating on the shares of companies that (for the most part) don’t even pay dividends. It’s a distraction.
Besides, we’re not talking about Bezos. Whatever else you might say about him, he’s not exactly a slumlord squeezing single mothers for rent money. We’re talking about the guy who managed to squirrel away an extra $80,000 over his long career, and buys some flipper shack to rent out for passive income. He definitely has most of his surplus tied up in that home… assuming he has one of his own, and assuming that home is similar, something like half of his wealth exists in that building and the plot underneath it. If he’s managed to do two or three of those, then even larger fractions of his wealth are invested in those properties.
For him it’s life or death. For you, it’s an academic discussion on some obscure internet forum as a gotcha against another guy who was offering a good faith, honest answer on how to effect positive changes with minor laws. But I guess it’s simpler and cheaper to just mobilize an army and perpetrate unnecessary violence. That landlord, he’s willing to reciprocate to keep it.
to be clear, as an anarchist i’m profoundly against central authorities,
Were that true, then you wouldn’t be talking about expropriation which requires central authorities. Your solution would be for people to simply squat in those homes… which already happens. And which hasn’t solved homelessness. This really isn’t a problem that capitalism is directly culpable for… when the capitalists find someone squatting in an “empty” dwelling, more often than not, they don’t resort to violence. They give those people a wad of cash to “move out”.
Why this hasn’t solved homelessness is that many of the homeless have severe sociological/psychological issues that prevent them from taking advantage. They need help beyond the “here’s a roof and a door that closes”. That help almost certainly requires a central authority, and those central authorities currently refuse to help. Not because they don’t want to (some do), not because they don’t have good ideas about how to help (some do), but because helping 10 homeless people quickly becomes helping 75,000 homeless people and that’s just not in the budget. Other municipal governments cheat and don’t bother to help if they see one helping… why bother when someone else is doing that? It’s easier, cheaper, and the homeless soon become “far away”.
It really is a game theory problem. And I told you how to create conditions to keep them from defecting so we can have the optimal outcome, and rather than appreciate the true solution, you’d rather do… well, what it is you’re doing now. There’s no hope for the human species. You’re all getting everything you deserve.
I’d introduce a (municipal) law on homelessness in some medium-sized American city. The nature of the law would allocate some minor funding for a peculiar type of homelessness census (to occur at set intervals), and would also declare certain homeless people to be the responsibility of that municipal government while declaring the rest to be the responsibility of other local governments (municipal, county, and state) based on some rather boring criteria. Such as…
And so on. The details of qualification are less important than the general idea: that certain homeless people are the responsibility of the locals, and that they can’t shirk responsibility for them. But that others, migratory, are not. Even as they disqualified those homeless people, they’d also be writing up paperwork that proves they are in fact the responsibility of other local governments elsewhere.
I would expect that other nearby local governments would enact similar local laws in retaliation, so it would have a crystallization effect, and eventually most or all throughout North America would do the same. Instead of trying to shirk responsibility for this problem, they’d start to take responsibility for them… after all, it’s a much more constrained problem once you no longer worry about the solution just attracting more homeless to your city, it’s a cheaper problem, and now you’ve declared yourself to be responsible for these people when they meet some reasonable criteria.
Without this, cities like Los Angeles and New York (secretly) find it impossible to deal with it on a rational and level basis. If you spend x dollars solving the problem for y homeless, you soon have 5y homeless or 20y homeless… and you no longer have enough money to do that. And if you can anticipate this happening, you never even try in the first place.
The criteria can be designed such that 99% of homeless people would qualify somewhere. And the small remainder would then be a much smaller issue, one that we might even expect the US federal government to pick up the tab for.
I get tired of hearing about how it is a problem of compassion or lack thereof, it is 100% a game theory problem.
How is homelessness a game theory problem? It’s a capitalism problem. There’s literally millions of empty dwellings (at least in France and USA) that could be used. How about, instead of a census, simply expropriating owners of empty housing? That would be a lot easier, a lot less costly, and 100% effective at housing homeless people.
I can’t tell if you didn’t read my comment, or you’re just not very insightful. The trouble with counter-intuitive ideas is that 99% of the population navigates through life using nothing but intuition… and so they’re completely blind to it.
That’s how.
Though I suppose if you just ship off all the homeless to gulags, in a sense that’s a “solution” too. I can see how that would appeal to some people. But I operate from a place of “it’s not a solution if it hurts other people”.
Sure. It will be less costly, if you ignore the tens of billions you’ll need to pay your soldiers doing the expropriation.
Or you could just enslave them, I guess. They’d be “free” in the Stalinist sense of the worse, really.
I was talking about some city of 250,000 spending $100,000 over the course of a few months. It’s a price tag so low even I sort of think it’s bullshit. But it’d work.
Why would requisitioning empty dwellings be complicated or require specialized infrastructure? I agree with you if we talk expropriating the wealth of our overlords, they will recruit militias and put up quite a fight. But we’re talking housing which is both really necessary for basic survival, and a very tiny portion of rich people’s wealth, so there’s two options to it:
I’m talking an entire country spending ~50K$ per year to employ two locksmiths full-time to break into abandoned houses and rehouse people. Can’t beat that price tag or its result. Or even better, just instruct the police (or better yet, dismantle it) so that when people do it without any funding, they don’t get in prison for “private property violations” or whatever bullshit they come up with. We live in countries with such abundance of resources that noone would starve or sleep on the streets, were it not for the police.
All in all, i really don’t see what you sense would be wrong with requisitioning empty dwellings, or what this has to do with stalinism. (to be clear, as an anarchist i’m profoundly against central authorities, and as a squatter i don’t expect any answers from the State; i simply pointed out if they wanted to they could rehouse everyone by just snapping their fingers, and that the housing crisis is a lie just like every other capitalist “crisis”)
Because when you requisition those empty dwellings and the owners refuse, you will need a large mechanized infantry to tell them that their refusals are irrelevant. Within the United States, the police authorities might substitute as that infantry, but do you have much confidence on them obeying? Even if they work, they’re hardly cheap. So instead, you go with some cannibalized portion of the US military, but they clock in at something like $0.8 trillion per year… does anyone think of that as inexpensive?
So, specialized? Dunno. But definitely non-cheap infrastructure.
Of true wealth, real estate comprises the bulk of it. Sure, Bezos (and most of the rest) have the vast portion of their wealth as stock/equity in various businesses… but that was never true wealth anyway. That’s imbeciles speculating on the shares of companies that (for the most part) don’t even pay dividends. It’s a distraction.
Besides, we’re not talking about Bezos. Whatever else you might say about him, he’s not exactly a slumlord squeezing single mothers for rent money. We’re talking about the guy who managed to squirrel away an extra $80,000 over his long career, and buys some flipper shack to rent out for passive income. He definitely has most of his surplus tied up in that home… assuming he has one of his own, and assuming that home is similar, something like half of his wealth exists in that building and the plot underneath it. If he’s managed to do two or three of those, then even larger fractions of his wealth are invested in those properties.
For him it’s life or death. For you, it’s an academic discussion on some obscure internet forum as a gotcha against another guy who was offering a good faith, honest answer on how to effect positive changes with minor laws. But I guess it’s simpler and cheaper to just mobilize an army and perpetrate unnecessary violence. That landlord, he’s willing to reciprocate to keep it.
Were that true, then you wouldn’t be talking about expropriation which requires central authorities. Your solution would be for people to simply squat in those homes… which already happens. And which hasn’t solved homelessness. This really isn’t a problem that capitalism is directly culpable for… when the capitalists find someone squatting in an “empty” dwelling, more often than not, they don’t resort to violence. They give those people a wad of cash to “move out”.
Why this hasn’t solved homelessness is that many of the homeless have severe sociological/psychological issues that prevent them from taking advantage. They need help beyond the “here’s a roof and a door that closes”. That help almost certainly requires a central authority, and those central authorities currently refuse to help. Not because they don’t want to (some do), not because they don’t have good ideas about how to help (some do), but because helping 10 homeless people quickly becomes helping 75,000 homeless people and that’s just not in the budget. Other municipal governments cheat and don’t bother to help if they see one helping… why bother when someone else is doing that? It’s easier, cheaper, and the homeless soon become “far away”.
It really is a game theory problem. And I told you how to create conditions to keep them from defecting so we can have the optimal outcome, and rather than appreciate the true solution, you’d rather do… well, what it is you’re doing now. There’s no hope for the human species. You’re all getting everything you deserve.