One question

[CJD]

(09-02-2023, 12:18 AM)HarleyDog Wrote: Without bringing up Trump and Biden, Repubs and Dems. How does the United States end poverty within our borders? How do we end homelessness? Let's not blame, but what's your solution?


For me, We need to funnel our resources into that goal. There are great people out there who are being left behind. As a nation, we give so much money to other countries. We have to take care of our own before we take care of others. Can't buy shoes for the neighbor kid and let your kid go to school barefoot.

What are your opinions? Please let this make it further than post 3 before ignoring the rules or else you may be part of the problem.

Step number 1 is nationalized healthcare. If you can't get treatment unless you have a full time job + disposable income, then there will inevitably be people who suffer from mental illnesses, physically crippling injuries and/or drug dependency that will lose everything and become homeless.

From there, you can start to address the non-healthcare related reasons for homelessness: broken homes and foster care creating people with no place to go once they turn 18, people unable to find work that pays enough to afford housing, 

These problems are much more difficult to solve, but affordable government sanctioned housing would be a start. If the market for housing is creating unattainable rents for people working minimum wage, the only way to create affordable housing is to subsidize the market. This could be done via means testing, or it could be done just via large blocks of low accommodation housing. This has obvious roadblocks, including people who believe housing like this lowers their property value and thus should only be allowed in the worst areas of any given city or state (NIMBY is a derogatory term for these people. It stands for Not-In-My-Back-Yard).

If this affordable housing is placed in an area that is too far from the city, then affordable public transportation is a must as well. Again, big problem, no easy solutions, but America has some of the worst public transit in the developed world. It would take a lot of local and state funded projects to really tackle this, as doing it federally would be virtually impossible to manage, but some guidelines or minimum requirements may be a good start on the federal level.

If affordable housing and affordable public transit were established, this would allow minimum wage/minimal training workers to have a place to live and a way to get to their job (and other places they may want to go between work and home).

Minimum wage increases would also help in both of these regards, as minimum wage has not kept up with inflation or productivity increases for literal decades.

"Broken families" are basically impossible to legislate, but societal shifts towards equality and acceptance would go a long way towards removing at least a portion of these occurrences. Coming out to your parents if you are LGBTQ+ risks being thrown out of your home, and battered women (or men in some cases) are also a cause of broken homes leading to homelessness. In some cases, a child could be thrown out of their home if they get pregnant as well or have an abortion, although these are probably on the lower end of the scale nowadays. By shifting societal views away from intolerance towards LGBTQ+ individuals and away from sexist/hateful relationship dynamics that lead to domestic abuse, you could realistically decrease occurrences of homelessness among those groups of people.

Finally, and this ties in with nationalized healthcare somewhat, but there simply aren't enough resources or understanding with how to manage mentally ill and addicted people. Recent studies indicate that roughly 30% of homeless people have mental health conditions, 38% of homeless people depend on Alcohol, and 26% depend on some other substance. Sobriety is a personal choice and forcing people to go through withdrawal has major psychological effects as well. This may be a chicken and egg situation. Are they homeless because of their addictions or are they addicted because they are depressed and looking to self medicate? Regardless, the resources are not available at the level they need to be to help those that are actually looking for help.

Homelessness is not something that you can solve overnight. It is going to take long, iterative, systemic changes to the way we house, transport and care for people across the entire population and, most importantly, it's going to take a lot of money. The money side is all about budgeting. There's plenty of fat in the federal budget, especially in the military sector, but we also need to revise how taxes are collected. There are way too many legal loopholes that prevent people (and corporations) from paying their fair share and this, along with a few other options, would be able to fund at least the beginning stages of this long, intense rebuild of our infrastructural issues. This is an infrastructure problem and healthcare problem combined, which makes it difficult to solve and, even in the process of solving it, you will see pushback if effects are not immediate (which they won't be). But, most importantly, the thing we, as Americans, are missing is the desire to actually solve the problem. Even California, supposedly a liberal beacon of light, have spent a lot of time trying to hide the problem, rather than solve it. Crackdowns on camping homeless people, crackdowns on visible homelessness and les of an investment on actually helping those people to get off the street and into better personal situations.

Basically, we need to replace every politician in America with people who actually care about solving the problem rather than appearing to solve it via obfuscation. 

Also, banning lobbying would help.