• Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    That’s just unfaithful interpretation of the argument, and you know it. US on average has 27 empty houses per a homeless person.

    • Pipoca@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      That’s technically true, but really not important. Houses are defined as vacant if they’re unoccupied on the day of a census. There’s many reasons a house might be technically vacant, but not currently be able to house a homeless person.

      Was the house just sold, and is it unoccupied for a week or a month between owners? It’s vacant. Did the owner just move into hospice or a memory care unit and their children haven’t yet sold the house because they need to arrange an estate sale? It’s vacant. Is the house under construction but is mostly built? It’s vacant. Is it not safe to live in, but not officially condemned? It’s vacant.

      Want to move to a city? Either you have to find the apartment of someone moving out, or you have to move into a vacant unit.

      Having a good number of vacant homes is a good thing, actually; having low numbers of vacancies in an area leads to housing becoming more expensive because you can’t move into a unit that isn’t vacant. Increasing housing supply relative to population leads to higher vacancy rates, but decreases housing costs.

      Housing-first approaches to homelessness seem to be good in practice. But those are typically done by either government-built housing or government- subsidized housing; it’s mostly orthogonal to vacancy rates.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      9
      ·
      1 year ago

      Right so the problem is that they don’t have money to buy those homes. It’s still not a problem with the bed store

      • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        The problems are:

        • they don’t have money to buy homes
        • they don’t have money to buy beds
        • we accept their suffering as necessary so that someone can make money from selling those things
        • we accept that their life is worth nothing without the value of their labor
        • we abdicate our own responsibility and become complicit by refusing to acknowledge the lack of humanity in this system

        Interpreting everything through individuality is a choice. Just because you refuse to acknowledge systemic injustice does not mean it does not exist.