xfreedHomelessness
IninewCrowWhat about the shareholders? … if we deal with homelessness, it will affect the shareholders!
Won’t someone think of the shareholders?!?
Okay, this bullshit. It’s not shareholders who would be negatively affected by this, and it’s not shareholders who are actively working against doing something about the problem. Shareholders are just an easy acceptable target to point your fingers at, whether it makes sense or not.
What needs to be done to tackle the homelessness problem (not the only thing, but probably the most important one) is to zone much, much more land inside or directly next to cities for affordable mid-rise multi-family homes. Guess who is opposed to that and has the power to do something about it? Existing property owners. Specifically owners of detached single family homes. Because doing that would negatively affect their property values. Personally, I think that shouldn’t matter, because what good is living in home that is worth absurd amounts of money on paper going to do you if society is falling apart because of it? But home owners are always massively concerned about their property values and will torpedo anything that might threaten it. Of course, pointing your fingers at home owners is much dicier than pointing them at shareholders, because even in a bubble like this one, you are bound to point at some people here who will feel personally attacked by that…
“Shareholders”, on the other hand, aside from those that are also home owners at the same time, don’t really have much reason to care one way or another about effective projects to reduce homelessness.
Hard agree onnmany of your points. Part of the issue with housing is how investment based home ownership is. We need to start looking at those investments as investments - a risk based choice that can be impacted by outside factors because of a change of needs of society. It certainly sucks to be on the loss of returns side if a risky investment… But a society where no one can have a secure place to live is going to eventually destabilize, crash and burn and that need is greater than the need for a profitable portfolio.
One of the many issues with a liberal free market is that we become accustomed to being very callous about the small fry at the bottom and more or less ambivalent or openly hostile about the sharks at the top but it’s the medium sized fish in the middle that nobody wants to hurt. They just “played the game right” not nessisarily taking more than their perceived due and not doing so astronomically better that their plight cannot be empathized with… But if they are the ones who are somehow crashing the ecosystem - even if its through no fault of their own - they will go down with it when it does and if it comes down to eating the costs of keeping everything afloat or everybody loses - well a choice to take everything down with them isn’t a noble one.
When enough people aren’t hitting the very base needs on the Maslow’s Heirachy of needs you start seeing a lot more widespread disordered ability to function and eventually if the course doesn’t properly correct we could see it do so in an abrupt and violent way. That does mean thinking collectively and realizing that the true ethical choice is the one that might hurt you in particular and sacrificing individual gains for the benefits of a community.
Not an easy thing when we have as a society been trained to be fairly misanthopic.