Why does the homeless situation continue to get worse despite the government spending millions of dollars on it.

tzaanthor · 2023-05-26T02:36:47+00:00

>considerable amount of money: millions

Uh. Dude. What? You know that's like, a Vancouver apartment. Millions is an inconsiderable amount of money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRAkobf-tVI&ab_channel=TheSmokingSkull

This problem will cost many BILLIONS of dollars. I don't know what to tell you, but you're not going to get far against a four decade long problem costing economies hundreds of billions by spending... millions. The homelessness crisis in Canada costs us 7 billion each year.

So there's you answer: we're spending about 1% of what we need to spend, and so we're getting 1% of the relief we need.

Your_Agenda_Sucks · 2023-05-25T22:34:54+00:00

Because 3/4 of homeless people are men, but we keep opening women's shelters.

zaph239 · 2023-05-26T15:49:26+00:00

The entire economic model of the West is broken. The golden age of the West was the 50-70's. That age was broken by energy shocks and increasing none Western competition. What was striking about the golden age, was wages grew steadily and the bosses weren't much richer that the workers.

This wasn't great if you were rich, so a new economic system was introduced in the West, starting in the 80's. This involved destroying unions, workers rights and outsourcing jobs to low cost countries. This was great for the rich, they paid poverty wages to make stuff and charged Western prices, profits soared. There was however a bit of problem. if you don't pay you workers enough, you don't have a market to sell to.

The rich solved this problem with debt; instead of earning money, workers were lent money by the rich. So the rich could still sell their products and yet at the same time outsource everything. This had the added bonus of allowing the rich to profit from debt repayments at the same time, now they really owned the plebs.

An added benefit of that was, wealth was transferred from earning to assets. While pay stagnated, stock markets and real estate boomed. Since these tended to benefit the rich, they won again.

Slight problem with this debt fuelled non-economy, was the numbers didn't add up. This was brutally exposed in 2008, when the whole system crashed.. What then should have happened, is all the bankers should have stripped of their wealth, made to live on the streets. While we returned the economic golden age before outsourcing.

What actually happened is governments and central banks world wide bailed out the rich. In fact these massive bail outs were so generous, the rich had more money than knew how to deal with. So they dumped it in assets, in real estate and stock markets. These boomed and the rich got richer off these asset bubbles.

Meanwhile the lying governments, backed by a lying media, blamed the poor for the disaster created by the rich. The lying governments insisted that the poor should face years of austerity to pay for the bankers bailout.

So the rich destroyed the world economy and were punished by getting even richer. Whereas the poor and increasingly the middle classes either got poorer or struggled to stand still.

The social problems you are seeing are a symptom of the completely broken economic model in the West.

MelissaMiranti · 2023-05-25T23:19:06+00:00

There are a few reasons, chief among them is the fact that the rich buy up homes to rent them out, and are perfectly fine with letting them sit empty rather than allowing someone to live there for less than an enormous profit.

Beljuril-home · 2023-05-25T22:49:50+00:00

Because the root cause of homelessness is mental (un)health, and no province is currently funding mental healthcare at levels sufficient to prevent homelessness.

TheRadBaron · 2023-05-26T02:51:27+00:00

You're missing the cost of housing in your list of causes. Homelessness is going up as the cost of housing is skyrocketing past wage growth.

Drug use is inevitable, in an increasingly large population of homeless people with no hope of a better life. They have nothing else to live for, and nothing to lose by ODing.

I've never touched a drug harder than weed, but if I were homeless I'd be looking for fetanyl within six months. No aid worker could stop me, no federal program could stop me - the only thing that could stop me would be a home.

Phantombiceps · 2023-05-26T05:04:43+00:00

In the US at least, homelessness is caused by high cost of living/ cost of housing. Bivariate analysis have been done on every city. The most mentally ill and most drug addicted cities do not have the highest rates of homelessness.

BendingBranchBelow · 2023-05-25T22:38:40+00:00

How about because the wealthy and powerful want us to see homeless people treated as subhuman so that they can be a visible deterrent to those of us tempted to give up on our "jobs"?

QueasyRider1 · 2023-05-26T00:22:25+00:00

Decades ago, we stopped keeping up with the demand for help for those with mental illness. In fact, we closed many psychiatric hospitals under the pretence that treatment “in the community” would be better (this was in the age of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and mental hospitals got a bad rap). However, politicians saw how much money was saved by closing hospitals and instead of using that money for community treatment programs they squandered it on other things. Since then there’s been no substantial increase in hospital beds or community treatment despite a big growth in population. If there’s an increase in budget it goes to a bloated bureaucracy.

Now, all those who can’t get treatment just live on the streets. And everyone else blames them for their unsafe feelings. They’d rather lock them up in jails. It’s absolutely horrible how we treat our fellow human beings.

Noobeater1 · 2023-05-26T08:23:07+00:00

Homeless people don't vote

NesVier · 2023-05-26T09:10:30+00:00

Because throwing money at something doesn't solve it. It would only happen if you had every relevant tool, institution and knowledge at your disposition and they were underfunding them. In this case it's because the policies and ways to prevent homelessness aren't the correct ones. I can punch the door with more strenght, it will only break with absurd force or by using the handle. Let's find the handle. Let's look at what did the countries that managed to diminish homelessness do. And that means, not shelters, but money, homes and jobs, a good free universal healthcare, rehab and mental health programs. Let's treat them like people who could be dear to us and that need to be picked up and helped, not as wortheless scum that deserve to be left to rot in a corner because they had the audacity to have a crippling addiction or of being born with a non-curable mental health problem.

International_Crew89 · 2023-05-26T01:21:52+00:00

Unfulfilling careers/jobs that are mostly focused on making money for the corporate elite, punishing financial costs involved with changing careers, depressing levels of financial pressures (especially in regards to housing, costs of daily living, and retirement), education systems that focus on creating employee-drones rather than healthy and happy citizens, political extremism, political cynicism resulting from an overall failure of governance, sexual paranoia/pessimism/alienation, rigid gender roles despite a very loud and disingenuous social movement promoting egalitarianism, lack of time and money to take care of one's own mental health, addictions to coping mechanisms that often end up hurting one's chances to improve mental health (substances, video games, shopping, social media, materialism in general, etc.), lack of emphasis on healthy social relationships (and, again, lack of time for such), a huge disconnect from nature (especially with our extremely car-based culture), AND feeling like you're doing worse in all areas of life than previous generations (sometimes backed up by the admonishments of said previous generations; "when I was your age I already.....").

I mean, regular people aren't doing great; it should come as no surprise that the lower classes are doing even worse, and most of us are just a few catastrophes away from falling down that ladder, (that's why there are so many of them).

sparkydoggowastaken · 2023-05-26T15:47:11+00:00

problem one: politicians throwing money at an issue to say they did something and waiting for it to fix itself

frackingfaxer · 2023-05-26T16:05:26+00:00

In a country like Canada, homelessness doesn't exist because there aren't enough houses to house everyone. There are plenty of homes and plenty incentive to build them, it's just that the incentive isn't to build homes that ordinary people can afford, it's to build expensive properties for wealthy folk to invest in. That's where the money is, and that's why houses are built, not to house people, but for profit.

The various initiatives tried by the government, i.e. the recent foreign buyer ban, don't go to the root of the issue and are in fact counterproductive to the whole system. Banning all those rich foreigners from buying real estate ends up messing with the incentive to build houses, which negatively impacts the development of new housing supply. Hence, all the loopholes to the ban, which largely neuter its effect on home ownership affordability for ordinary Canadians. Hence, the problem persists, but hey, at least they're trying something.

Visible_Juice_4204 · 2023-05-26T22:43:31+00:00

Look at how many Canadian politicians have stakes in housing and youll see why. All of those politicians are actively gaining by letting the housing market inflate to ridiculous numbers. Unfortunately this means the problem will be nearly impossible to fix, short of cleaning the whole slate imho.

lumen-lotus · 2023-05-27T01:54:36+00:00

Because people think poverty is feminized when the majority of homeless people are men. No one cares about men.

Current_Finding_4066 · 2023-05-27T12:03:56+00:00

They do not care to fix the underlying issues. A few million are just like placing a bandaid on a gunshot wound.

dumbass_spaceman · 2023-05-26T01:58:09+00:00

The only solution to homelessness is deregulating zoning and implementing a tax on the unimproved value of land.

richardparadox163 · 2023-05-26T01:33:17+00:00

I can’t speak for Canada. But one reason in America is the “housing first” policy that was pushed in the ‘90’s and is mandated by the federal government for states/localities/nonprofits to recieve federal funding, which hasn’t worked and has squeezed out alternative methods of solving homelessness (mental health, job training, building more low costhousing etc.). https://youtu.be/gcZhmUfDePE [Disclaimer, video from Reason a libertarian publication, so they’re biased about government incentives and unintended consequences creating problems, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, also if you research it, many across the homeless nonprofit community seem to agree]

Also just the cost of housing across the English speaking world (don’t want to generalize to the Western world but certainly the US, Canada, UK, and I think Australia) because WE NEED TO BUILD MORE HOUSING, there just aren’t enough homes even for people without mental health issues and with jobs. Of course its going to be expensive for the government to house people, housing is expensive. Withoit allowing for more building, all the government spending money to house homeless people does is increase demand without increasing supply, driving up prices and paradoxically increasing homelessness while also increasing the cost to house those homeless and the cycle continues.

Title	Why does the homeless situation continue to get worse despite the government spending millions of dollars on it.
Author	Fast-Mongoose-4989
Upvotes	68
Comments	35
Date	May 25, 2023 2:16 PM UTC (3 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/13rize5/why_does_the_homeless_situation_continue_to_get/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/why-does-the-homeless-situation-continue-to-get.1220336 https://theredarchive.com/post/1220336

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