[ExI] Basic Income - Basic Housing?

[Kelly Anderson]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 12:08 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>wrote:

> One way to avoid creating ghettoes is for the public housing agency to
> make spot purchases in established areas. This has been tried to an extent
> in Australia and seems to work well, although there are still large public
> housing projects from the 50's and 60's.
>

Singapore has a fairly successful program because they created a path to
apartment ownership. Prior to establishing potential ownership, the
apartments were rented and trashed. After creating a path to ownership,
things went a little better down there.

One problem related to homelessness in the USA is mental health care. Many
of the chronically homeless are mentally ill, and would not willingly
choose to move into an apartment, no matter how nice. Though some will
accept services, if offered by an attractive young woman in a large pink
bunny suit. Once there, they would be incapable of taking care of the
place. So you would also have to pay for daily maid service to keep it
nice. Might not be such a huge problem with robot maids... but there are
jobs Americans won't do, as you might recall.

According to the gubment...
http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/Mental_Illness.pdf
"20 to 25% of the homeless population in the United States suffers from
some form of severe mental illness."

So in 2009, they spent a billion and a half dollars (that they borrowed
from China) extra in TARP to address homelessness. I would argue that
unemployment stayed artificially high because of those government run
shenanigans, but the socialists would disagree.

The mentally ill used to be housed in large institutions, often in barbaric
conditions, but our friends at the American Civil Liberties Union made sure
that those got shut down in the early 70s. This has left a bit of a hole in
our system that still has not been filled, except by homeless mentally ill
people. There are a lot of group homes for the mentally incompetent. These
are just more expensive versions of the large institutions. My mentally
challenged daughter lives in one of these, and I grant that it is nicer
than my house, but she lacks freedom so I would not trade places with her.

People who are not mentally ill or drug addicted tend to rotate in and out
of homelessness as a temporary condition. Those who are mentally ill or
drug addicted can be chronically homeless.

Then there is the very small percentage of people who prefer homelessness
as a life style. In a free nation, it would be hard to force them into
housing. They enjoy the feeling of being free from NSA surveillance, and
other things because homelessness equates to invisibility.

I admit to a huge amount of ignorance on the subject. But I do know there
are no simple solutions to this complex problem despite what some exuberant
journalist has to say on the issue. He's been watching too many TED talks,
where all the world's problems are solved in 18 minutes.

-Kelly
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