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POVERTY IS A FEATURE NOT A BUG
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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These are two different groups of people
The first, who are on board with state housing projects, are the common people who still have empathy for their fellow people
The second, who are totally on board with homelessness because the housing projects are "too expensive", belong to the political and economic elite
Yeah, that cognitive dissonance doesn't exist, and is misleading.
Dishonest framing. The average worker has nothing to do with this issue. They are not the people we're asking to solve this. Like I already said, it's the political and economic elite. Capitalists. The state. Where is the worker's money supposed to be sent? On what is their effort to be put?
Yep, neoliberal chuds, as I said
How? What variables have I abstracted into a black box, here? What few mechanisms have I reduced the issue to? To me, "people want affordable housing but don't wanna pay for it" sounds extremely oversimplified.
I'm not "picking an argument with you" lol. I'm just correcting what I see as a defeatist, "what can we even do" attitude.
Sounds like semantic fudging to me. "These people need homes! No, stop building homes, it's too expensive!!" sounds like cognitive dissonance to me.
There's also the third group of people who realizes that homelessness is a complex problem that won't be solved by more housing.
That's just a cop out. Of course it's complex. No reason to just throw your hands in the air and say "it's too hard, let's just leave it to the market". We already tried that. It led to this.
Also, no one is saying, literally, "building more houses will fix homelessness alone, nothing else needed, DURRR". That's just a strawman.
What we also need is a complete end to landlording. But this of course won't happen under the current system, because capitalism fucking worships private property.
The entire post is about low income housing as a solution to people sleeping in tents. Building more apartments won't stop people from living in tents.
Pointing out that it's a complex issue that isn't solved by more houses is pretty much the opposite of a strawman
No, that is not the point it's making. It's making the point that neoliberal chuds would prefer to see homeless people than affordable housing. It doesn't say that building housing itself is the sole solution. Hell, it doesn't say anything at all about building. We don't see any construction in that picture, the blocks are just there. You could read it as saying that already built flats should just be given to people.
I don’t think it fails, but it does come from a specific cultural perspective.
Those are “ugly Soviet buildings” built by the government. That already communicates cost and the unwillingness to bear it in the US.
Nonono, it's unreasonable for taxes to go toward helping the poor. They live on the street and starve by their own choice. No one wants to pay for those wretched people!
Where are the police when you need them to quickly usher the inconvenient truth of my selfish lifestyle out of my sight?
You’re in lemmy.ml, a Marxist instance, reading a meme criticizing capitalism and saying that Soviet apartment buildings are a stretch?
No, they’re the whole point of the meme. Paying for them is the point, who paid for the Soviet buildings? The message is that the Soviet Union built these and American capitalists allow people to live in tents on the street (while calling those buildings ugly). Housing projects would be a perfect “yeah but” except they are very low priority and not so common.
Ugly Soviet buildings are themselves a meme. Up there with the hammer and sickle and the color beige when Americans visualize the Soviet Union.
Yes, any meme trying to say something with layers is probably misusing the format.
Exactly. It's not hard to keep the exterior of those buildings looking nice. You just have to pay someone to maintain it.
It's also forgetting that a significant portion of homeless people are homeless by choice, or are homeless for reasons that just providing housing won't resolve.
People have this idea that all homeless people are just regular people who experienced hard times, but that's just a minority. Most homeless are mentally ill people who won't take their meds or drug addicts who aren't willing to quit.
It sucks, and they shouldn't have to live on the streets, but you can't force people to change.
I don’t think people have that idea at all, if anything they are more likely to assume a homeless person is mentally ill and drug addicted than they are to think they are experiencing hard times or employed but unable to pay for housing.
However housing first has been pretty successful, but goes against many people’s values for some reason. The big fear of someone getting something undeserved is strong.
Some might say the big fear of someone getting something undeserved is strong enough to prop up an entire political party.
But it is not exclusive to them, of course. Some are just very bad about it.
safasdf
For many it literally is a choice, and framing homelessness as something that no one has control over is problematic.
You're more than welcome to look up statistics. ~60% of the chronicly homeless have life long mental health issues, and ~80% have substance abuse issues.
Pretty much every city/state has resources to help the homeless, but the homeless have to be willing to accept the help. Most shelters are drug free, so addicts don't want to stay there and they won't accept people whose mental illness makes them violent.
You can't force a person to take their medicine or stop doing drugs unless you want to start building more prisons.
Again, I was never saying that all homelessness is a choice, but a lot of people choose not to accept the help that's available.
Source: My wife has her masters in the field and used to work with these populations as an addiction counselor, in Texas, so I know that resources exist at a state level even in a state that clearly hates it's citizens.
Neoliberals never seem to get around to actually address what's being said. They just hem and haw about why they can't do anything about it, as they pull their SUVs into the third stall in their garage.
I think you're spot on.
I've certainly noticed the change. There are some posts lately that are indistinguishable from those on alt-right breeding grounds like 4chan and reddit. That's why I wasn't too gung-ho about persuading people to join Lemmy -- there were a lot of people on reddit I was hoping wouldn't come.
I've started using raddle more, which comes with its own problems, but at least I don't have to start by convincing people not to hate marginalized groups every time I open my inbox.
What’s raddle?
Raddle is a site similar to reddit, but it's run by anarchists (anarcho-primitivists to be specific, but I've never felt unwelcome as an anarcho-communist)
https://raddle.me/
I go by ObiWanHelloThere_wav on raddle
This is just conservative propaganda
I'm a liberal, buddy. Homelessness is a very complex issue that won't be solved by building more housing.
Yeah, liberals and conservatives only differ on whether gay people should be put to death, so you're not really saying much. And being liberal does not, whatsoever, make you immune to conservative propaganda. We live in a capitalist society, founded on liberal values: whether conservatives know it or not, it is liberal values they are conserving.
Also, as I've said about 5 times now, no one is saying that building houses alone will solve the issue. So stop beating that strawman.
I believe you are arguing in good faith, so I'm hoping you can provide a source for your claim that the majority suffer from mental illness or drug addiction.
Yeah that can't be right... The problem with these discussions I think is there's a very big difference between the technical definition of homeless, and the one people use colloquially.
It's the most visible minority of homeless people that tend to be the entrenched ones people think of when they think of homelessness, and those people essentially have nothing in common with the other "homeless" people other than having no permanent home. It makes the discussion harder as people are using the same word but talking about different things.
https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/programs_campaigns/homelessness_programs_resources/hrc-factsheet-current-statistics-prevalence-characteristics-homelessness.pdf
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