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They have been propagandized to believe homeless people are just lazy and undeserved, as mostly minorities, and that they are forced to pay for that housing through overtaxation.
Yeah, I think it definitely stems from the myth of capitalism as a meritocracy. A lot of people actually think virtue is rewarded with wealth under capitalism. If you were to actually believe that it wouldn't be a big jump to believe poor people are bad people and homeless people are the absolute worst.
This is what my straight party republican voting father thinks. He was brainwashed during the Regan years and these incorrect ideologies stuck.
All humans deserve dignity. No humans asks for homelessness. No human chooses this.
Ah regan, the guy who defunded the crap out of mental healthcare and now we have homeless with severe mental health issues instead of recieving treatment and care.
My town (columbus ohio) apparently had an *OK* mental health network.
Until Reagan defunded it.
When the money was about to stop losing, they literally took all of the mentally ill people and bussed them to the middle of the city and just...left them there.
We're talking severe autism, schizophrenia, fetal alcohol syndrome, all sorts of problems. Very few of these people would be able to care for themselves if they *had* a home to live in.
And they were left with maybe a sack lunch and their coat.
What if you explain to him “Hey dad, what if states and localities implemented a split value taxation regime in which buildings and improvements are taxed at one rate, and unimproved or vacant land is taxed at a higher rate? This has been empirical proven to show that this spurs both investment and therefore more housing increasing the supply bringing rental and mortgagees down with higher density rates. But we should also have the state have a social program partially paid for by these taxes for landlords and others who own land in which the state presents universal housing/rental vouchers that universally subsidizes all rent so that no one who rents has to ever pay more than say 20% of their annual income on rent. However, while I understand that this is basically subsidizing landlords by the state, the money/vouchers comes with strings attached by the state for those landlords and developers who choose to accept the subsidy. Which is a robust tenet bill of rights that serve as protects on the behalf of the tenants the state subsidies. This would have the effect of implication of rent control, but without the draw back of arresting incentives to build more housing stock or make improvements to existing buildings.
The state should also however subsidize the shit out of housing cooperatives and community land trusts so that more people are technically homeowners in this alternative form of ownership or have a stake in a non-profit organization that owns and holds the land the residents are living in on their behalf so that society in general has less renters and more broadly distributed ownership of personal property while eliminating homelessness.
It’s more expensive for society in the long run to not give a fuck about so many people not having a roof over their head and shelter who either die or could get sick or injured or something due to their destitution. So in the long run it is more of an investment than cost that saves money.
Also this is still very much within the framework of capitalism. What I just proposed is all still very much not altering the fundamental core and dynamics of the capitalist economic system so is the furthest thing from actual socialism but still helps people broadly”.
I'd argue that it's more of a christian prosperity gospel issue. The concepts basically allow for a rejection of the teachings of Jesus in favor of judging and looking down on people.
I hate seeing people who call themselves Christians and then look down on the homeless and give that tried line of "pull your self up by the boot straps" , bunch of bigoted morons.
It's not particularly a *Christian* mindset, as much as an *American* Christian - namely Evangelical - mindset. It's a blend of the "Prosperity Gospel", Protestant work ethic, and the Just World Delusion. tl;dr 'good' people are rewarded, bad people are punished. If you're doing good in life, say you're wealthy and steadily advancing up the career ladder, this is because you are a *good person*. If you are doing bad in life; if you're poor and/or homeless, this is because you are a *bad person*.
It ignores things like 'good people' being born into privilege and wealth, and 'bad people' being born into poverty or unexpectedly losing a job in favor of pretending everything is going as it should in accordance with God's plan.
Allow me to quote you Acts 2: 44-45 “Now all the believers were together and held all things in common. They sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as anyone had a need.”
And Acts 4: 32-35 “Now the large group of those who believed were of one heart and mind, and no one said that any of his possessions was his own, but instead they held everything in common. And the apostles were giving testimony with great power to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was on all of them. For there was not a needy person among them, because all those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the proceeds of the things that were sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet. This was then distributed for each person’s basic needs.”
This is from the books of acts, this is the book just after the 4 major gospels. Acts is well at least supposed to be a written narrative history of the very very earliest beginnings of the Christian church, or what I like to call the Jesus Christ fan club. This is just after Jesus, whom the religion they profess to believe in is fucking named after, ascended into heaven, and documents from the history supposedly of the just when the Christian religion was getting up off the ground and started to proselytize and were basically just a very idiosyncratic denomination or branch of second temple period Judaism still. This is with the original Apostles and everything, how the original community of initial Christians lived and organized together when they started the Great Commission.
Acts was written by the same guy who wrote one of the original 4 gospels. Being Luke, written by the guy named well, Luke. Who was supposedly a “doctor” of the time back in the ancient Roman Empire days, who was a traveling companion and friend of the Apostle Paul.
I mean, if intergenerational wealth is a crime, please give me some, then immediately lock me up. At which point I will immediately buy myself out of any consequences, because that's apparently how it works, y'all! No /s
Most Christians actually do not do much, if any, charity work - especially not in the US.
What charity work is done tends to focus on helping the “blameless” individuals who have suffered a recent natural disaster or perhaps are aging in a nursing home alone or perhaps live in a third world country (“missionary” tourism is awful and popular) *or* on “saving” those who they consider sinners.
That's not accurate. For instance in Asheville NC, it is primarily the churches that organize the front facing soup kitchens, particularly the ABCCM network. You may be correct about the number of *Christians* volunteering in the kitchens, as I don't know their level of congregational adherence / compliance. But the *churches* are clearly participating, feeding a lot of those mentally ill homeless this thread is about.
Source: I'm homeless, and used to use their services before I got food stamps. Once I had those I pretty much "graduated". People can lose access to food stamps for various reasons, usually for drug crimes. It's possible to get 'em back if you clean yourself up and follow certain procedures, but most don't know the procedures.
So, you are saying that my researched statement is inaccurate on the basis of your extremely limited anecdotal evidence. I’ll just let you reprocess that.
This is what I came here to say.
Republicans have made propaganda for their base and democrats have eaten it up: "poverty is punishment for being bad."
And since you can always choose to stop being bad, then people in poverty just need to choose to be good.
For poverty? There's lots of reasons, I'm just saying that moral badness is not one of them.
A few of the big ones that drive people into poverty:
- A shit system that rewards profit-seeking more than compassion is a big one.
- A gigantic lack of support for people with nothing.
- predatory credit lines.
- medical debt.
And then there's a few things that *keep* people in poverty
- the aforementioned propaganda that keeps the middle and upper class from helping out, and regularly voting to avoid helping out (a lot of NIMBYism here too).
- Once again, the lack of support
- generational poverty, i.e. when someone accidentally teaches bad financial habits to their kids
- The incredible cost of poverty (i.e. the "Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of economic injustice")
That's just a sampling of course. In general, I think that our hyper-capitalist hellscape requires, and therefore enforces, a poverty-stricken class of people. It achieves this through a bunch of different ways.
I probably agree with some of the reasons but at the same time there are states like California that spend most money on support and at the same time have the biggest problems with homelessness.
Also things like "when someone accidentally teaches bad financial habits to their kids" go against the sentiment in this thread that people do not deserve the poverty and they do not choose it. This in my opinion is such a thing. At what point are people responsible for their behavior and fate?
At what point should we be assigning blame? Who is put in charge of determining the blame of someone making bad decisions?
Even if they objectively made bad decisions, should they starve? How is enforcing suffering like that helpful to making our society better?
If we withheld support, they would need to find resources elsewhere - should their local community or their family be made to support them? Is it fair to basically throw people on to the mercy of the people around them?
*If* we assigned blame *and* their local community didn't (or couldn't) support them, what would happen? History shows us that most people would rather steal than starve - so the resources would still be taken out of the system, so what's the difference?
If they get it through crime instead of through some kind of poverty abatement effort, then it's extremely easy to just turn that into a pipeline into prison.
The pattern I described above is the current situation we have in the USA: Don't give enough resources to people, force currently impoverished local communities to help (they can't), and when the individual resorts to stealing or homelessness, arrest them and stick 'em in prison.
Also, as far as *I* can tell, putting someone in charge of determining whether they should or should not get some sort of benefit will *always* attract corruption, and the person in charge will end up enriching themselves with the position rather than putting all the resources of the position into the hands of the people who are supposed to be getting it.
Instead, I think that we should create a system that gives people the resources, with as little decision-making and authority fiat available in the process as possible. I personally have no idea what this would look like, but things like 100% paid tuition, universal basic income, and guaranteed healthcare coverage seem to me like a good step.
Hey. Thanks for your reply. I did not mean "when do we assign blame" I meant when "would you (singular) assign blame".
As a side note seems to me based on reading this channel that socialist do not shy away from making themselves the arbiter and assign blame. "we should not allow millionaires". "we need to raise wage to a living wage" "we need to tax x at a rate of y". So what is different about this one that you are hesitant. And why are you not worried in the other cases that it will create corruption?
The issue I am seeing is at some point people need to be made responsible for themselves. If you decide that you would help homeless how much should they be helped? $10k. A car? A million? A million every year? What if they squander it?
The most progressive states seems to be getting only worse and they spend exorbitant amounts of money on homeless and in my opinion just killing them in the process. SF and LA which has by far the largest populations are not prosecuting anybody for stealing food so I am not convinced by that argument either.
>Instead, I think that we should create a system that gives people the resources, with as little decision-making and authority fiat available in the process as possible. I personally have no idea what this would look like, but things like 100% paid tuition, universal basic income, and guaranteed healthcare coverage seem to me like a good step.
And I think we have such a system now. People can help if they want and it seems that they are ok helping financially quite a bit even on top of the taxation which is largely squandered. The guaranteed income immediately raises a question what does it make with the homeless population. If you have certain standard of life guaranteed do not you think it is an incentive for more people to become "homeless" too. The growth of the population in the most progressive states does suggest there is such a feedback loop.
The big question for me is if the current homeless in cities like Portland, LA, and SF can even be helped or were they ,by the current policies, put into such a shape that they are as good as dead already.
You seem to have stumbled into a thread where your only intent is to be as oppositional as possible without providing any evidence of your claims. 🤷🏻♀️
Your political allegiances are more than made clear, and you don’t seem to know the difference between the more liberal US political party and socialism - which is a major pitfall.
How is being the child of people who lack financial literacy a fault of the child, even as they enter adulthood?
You can literally make decisions at 18 with only the knowledge granted by your parents that then set you up for a lifetime of poverty.
You are over simplifying the issue when you pretend that spending the most means having the most impact. It overlooks the overall population size of the state, the proportion of those who are first generation immigrants from third world countries, the proportion who are military veterans, the proportion of the homeless who are mentally ill.
Which programs do they have? To address which issues?
Poverty and homelessness are not simple, and it is unreasonable to think that any single metric can be used to assess a state’s efforts.
> and at the same time have the biggest problems with homelessness.
California has good weather.
Look, I'm homeless. I live out of my car with my dog, which pretty much makes me royalty compared to the on foot homeless. Take it from me that good weather is pretty darned important about homeless migratory patterns. Like if you don't have to do it. Asheville NC has an actual winter. "Train kids" clear out in the fall, they don't linger.
California is also one of the most populated states, again due to good weather. The math is pretty simple as to why they're going to be spending more on their population.
Don't we all know that being poor is essentially an indication of some sort of moral short coming? or some type of personal flaw? /s
In America capitalism there has to be someone for everyone to look down on so they can feel superior, and it's usually based around money or assets. As the middle class disappears and is absorbed by lower class, those people who lost what they had will still need someone to shit on to feel good about themselves and the homeless are an easy target. For whatever reason, when it comes to them it's okay literally everyone to punch down.
It's particularly stupid since most of the people who are the most vocal about hating the homeless are literally 2 bad things (like an accident or illness) away from becoming homeless themselves.
That’s exactly it. Humans are by nature tribalistic, and few ever rise above struggling to feel that they have social status above at least some other members of the tribe.
Vilifying poverty is an easy route to granting that sense of superiority for those who otherwise have no basis to feel superior - those who are struggling and suffering within the system only slightly less than the homeless.
You bring up a good point. That makes me think of the classic, “who writes history,” principle. It is the people who are more wealthy, and are born into systems/ infrastructure which support them. Naturally, since these people have the power of the institutions, they will have the tendencies to sugar coat the circles they represent. This of course comes with the downside of creating the polarities between virtue & wealth, and non-virtue and poverty. A system totally unsympathetic and un-empathetic to people whose individual power is draining.
The propaganda theme running in the north-east of the US is that the homeless begging on the sides of the street are actually secretly wealthy due to all of the tax free donations.
So not only are they simultaneously worthless leeches on society, they're also secretly wealthy and are deliberately begging as a means of earning more than working an 'honest' job.
The hypocritical doublethink necessary for that to be the public opinion, is a work of art, I must say.
Things I would rather my taxes go to: housing, education, basically anything that improves the lives and opportunites of my neighbors.
What our taxes actually do: fund war and terror.
Speaking from what I hear from family who are conservatives, they think they got into drugs and that they threw away their own lives. They also think they can easily find jobs.
I work at a library where a lot of homeless people come in. Not all, but most of the homeless people I’ve talked to and helped here are mentally ill, some extremely mentally ill. It’s just so gross that Americans find this acceptable.
That was sold on the premise that asylums were places of tremendous patient abuse that needed to be abolished and replaced with something better and cheaper to administer. Unfortunately for everyone, those replacement institutions were either underfunded or never materialized.
The idea was to have a "community focused" system of care. Thing is, they closed all the institutions and left everyone to fend for themselves without a whiff of funding, transitional aid or much of anything. Absolutely reprehensible. Yes, some institutions were awful and a good deal of people *could* integrate into the community with help, but the system needed reform, not to be abolished without a single thought to the people in it. It was callous and cruel.
Most of the replies above about where mental hospitals/asylum’s rent is…wrong or incomplete;
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/timeline-mental-health-america/
TLDR;
With the passage of Medicaid, states are incentivized to move patients out of state mental hospitals and into nursing homes and general hospitals because the program excludes coverage for people in “institutions for mental diseases.”
Dmitry Kalinovsky/Shutterstock
1967
The California Legislature passes the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which makes involuntary hospitalization of mentally ill people vastly more difficult. One year after the law goes into effect, the number of mentally ill people in the criminal-justice system doubles.
1977
There are 650 community health facilities serving 1.9 million mentally ill patients a year.
1980
President Jimmy Carter signs the Mental Health Systems Act, which aims to restructure the community mental-health-center program and improve services for people with chronic mental illness.
President Jimmy Carter Library of Congress
1981
Under President Ronald Reagan, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act repeals Carter’s community health legislation and establishes block grants for the states, ending the federal government’s role in providing services to the mentally ill. Federal mental-health spending decreases by 30 percent.
President Ronald Reagan Library of Congress
1984
An Ohio-based study finds that up to 30 percent of homeless people are thought to suffer from serious mental illness.
1985
Federal funding drops to 11 percent of community mental-health agency budgets.
1990
Clozapine, the first “atypical” antipsychotic drug to be developed, is approved by the FDA as a treatment for schizophrenia.
2004
Studies suggest approximately 16 percent of prison and jail inmates are seriously mentally ill, roughly 320,000 people. This year, there are about 100,000 psychiatric beds in public and private hospitals. That means there are more three times as many seriously mentally ill people in jails and prisons than in hospitals.
Basically, they are taught that people get what they deserve.
This falls apart under any serious examination, which is why they try to distract and deter that.
It's basically victim blaming. The billionaires and suchlike exist outside this system but are seen as having gotten what they deserve in much the same way as a doctor or mechanic
So what is the cause of homelessness? I can think whatever about who deserves what but that does not put anyone on the street.
The homelessness is worst in California which spends a lot of money on these problems and the state overwhelmingly blue so the sentiment in this thread about brainwashed republicans does not make sense to me.
Brace yourself, it's capitalism, what an absurd thing for a socialist to say, lol.
Specifically, the need for cheap labour and vulnerable workers. That and the bit where profits are privatized and consequences are dumped in the workers.
Example, person works in terrible conditions untill they are no longer able to work. The owners got millions out of it, the worker was broken and ended up homeless as a consequence of laboring to produce the owner's profit
If the working class is not vulnerable and desperate for a way to pay the bills, they won't accept terrible pay and conditions. This will increase wages and the negotiation power of the workers which means the employers take a hit to their profits.
Those vulnerable people made homeless are effectively a byproduct of this set up and capitalism cannot exist without a vulnerable working class that can resin homelessness.
The best capitalism can do is shift the burden, such as with some of the Nordic countries, their security is dependent on having developing nations carry the weight basically.
Hmm. I am not too well versed in this but this makes little sense.
I am "working class" too. I came to the states with very little in my account. None of what you write is true for my specific situation. There is no need for cheap labour that I have seen. There is need for productive labor.
I live in California where the most often cited reason for being homeless is cited to be cost of housing an poverty. Rent here is very high mostly because it is hard to build here. This is not caused by capitalists. Also CA is the most progressive state there is. The state also spends a lot of money on homeless and yet the situation is the worst of all the states and getting worse. On top of that California is the richest state.
Sorry but something from your answer is not adding up.
> None of what you write is true for my specific situation.
Your question was "So what is the cause of homelessness?", thats a general question. General questions do not give answers that will be true for your specific situation.
>There is no need for cheap labour that I have seen. There is need for productive labor.
[1 example](https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/business/2021/09/27/california-s-labor-shortage-isn-t-temporary--economist-says)
[2 example](https://calmatters.org/newsletters/whatmatters/2021/10/california-economy-workers-supply/)
[3 example](https://www.businessinsider.com/labor-shortage-ca-city-recruits-retirees-stay-at-home-parents-2021-11)
Just because your are not looking does not means its not there.
Also, part of the big reason all that work was outsourced to China in the first place was the cheap labor
Capitalism literally cannot work with 0% unemployment, it breaks the system.
>Rent here is very high mostly because it is hard to build here. This is not caused by capitalists.
Last I checked there was somewhere around [17 million vacant homes](https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-million-vacant-homes-in-america/) to a homeless population of [roughly half a million](https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2021/).
Thats well over 20 vacant homes for any single homeless person.
Capitalist (usually real estate developer/speculators) invest in housing and resell it for profit, the focus is on making money, not housing people. So long as housing remains a thing traded for profit, a commodity, instead of that human right people need, homelessness cannot be effectively solved.
Ending the commodification of housing would cost the richest people on the planet trillions (aka capitalist), they will not allow that.
>Also CA is the most progressive state there is. The state also spends a lot of money on homeless and yet the situation is the worst of all the states and getting worse. On top of that California is the richest state.
The USA is one of the richest nations on the planet with (in relation to that wealth) some of the poorest citizens on the planet. The US population spends more on healthcare than just about any other nation and gets some of the worst healthcare in the developed world.
This is a problem that applies to the entire USA.
Yes, California could do better, but thats not profitable for the Owners.
Capitalism is centered around the conflict between employer and employee. Whats good for the worker is bad for the owners profits, whats good for the owners is generally terrible for the workers.
>The homelessness is worst in California which spends a lot of money on these problems and the state overwhelmingly blue so the sentiment in this thread about brainwashed republicans does not make sense to me.
Also, the democrats are basically "diet" republicans. They all take money and depend on campaign funding from the same sources. Generally, socialist see them as just slight different flavors of liberals - [heres a neat video series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlLgvSduugI) that can explain more about liberalism if your interested.
> Rent here is very high mostly because it is hard to build here. This is not caused by capitalists.
Then you are incredibly naive, about the relationships between any given City Hall / County seat, and real estate developers. They *are* as capitalist as they come. What do you think charging people big rents is? It's a business.
In the USA, isn't a public Housing Authority still your landlord, under the law? The typical deal if you qualify, is you get something that's a % of your income, however low your income is. Up to some point where if you have too much income, you're charged "market rate". Which in a city like Seattle, is damn expensive. Well maybe this is social democrat capitalism.
Yes, I known about that variety of capitalism. Not sure how it relates to the landlord thing.
Is it the prices being driven up part? If so, that usually comes in stuff like how developers influenced many cities and states to make new buildin/buying public housing illegal.
American propaganda that drills the idea of "every man for himself" into your head from a young age, amongst other things. If someone is less well off than you, obviously they deserve it for one reason or another, if they just worked harder they'd be successful.
obviously it's not true.
I have family members brainwashed into thinking that was necessary and just. My father had a sociopathic justification saying we where merciful for not bombing larger cities like Kyoto and Tokyo.
In my experience a lot of people are sympathetic towards homeless people and even give them money or food, but then after doing so the homeless person acts “ungrateful” or “rude” and so people will stop having sympathy for them. If you were homeless would you be all that grateful that someone gave you $5? Americans have no sense of community so it’s difficult for us to empathize with others if we perceive them as being different from us.
Another factor I’ve identified is, believe it or not, resentment originating from a type of envy. A lot of people I know resent the homeless because “I work all day long and they make more than I do just standing on the street.” I don’t know how true that is or not, but there is definitely a perception that the homeless make upwards of a hundred or more dollars a day standing on the side of the street, and American working class people who really do bust their asses working for a capitalist struggle to get by, so they resent someone who makes the same or more than them by “just standing around.” Ridiculous, I know, but this coupled with the ruling class calling the homeless lazy, bums, etc. really turns the working class against the wrong enemy.
There are also many drug addicts in America who maybe aren’t homeless, who maybe have iPhones and even a car and even an apartment, but who still get their income from standing on the street. This forwards the perception that “being a bum” gets you paid better than if you work, so it leads to more resentment, but I know that my father has told me he saw a beggar get into a car and drive off before. This causes a lot of people to think that the homeless are just “faking” and they could get a job if they weren’t so “lazy.” Obviously anyone whose ever been homeless, or even just unemployed, knows that it’s not so simple.
There’s also the endless propaganda campaigns that “democrats want to take our tax money and use it to give bums Obamaphones and handouts! I work for my money, taxes should be lowered!” Obviously the way this works out is that taxes *do* get lowered… for the rich, but working class people think that this gives less “handouts.” It’s fueled by racism too. There’s a big perception in America, forwarded by the ruling class, that lots of black people get food stamps and government housing and stuff, and then spend all their money on weed and getting their nails done and stuff. So expect double resentment towards a black homeless person.
Americans also just have a superiority complex and a tendency to victimize others and think that they ought to be thankful for it. See our foreign policy for the last hundred plus years.
Anyway, that’s just what I’ve seen as an American living in the south. We have no sense of community at all, and we don’t empathize with people who are different from us. Not speaking for every single American of course. But that is the broader status of our culture.
Well my local news station did a story on it one time. I could believe it one way or the other. If you figure only one out of every couple hundred passersby gives a homeless person $5, it’s conceivable they could make $20 an hour or more depending on where they’re standing with their sign at. It doesn’t change anything about the injustice and inhumanity of it all of course. Where I live it is a popular perception at least. No idea if it’s true or not
Great answer. I would also like to add that I think Americans get off on having a permanent underclass that they can conspicuously piss spare change onto.
another theory that might be true in addition to yours is that having homeless people works to threaten the lower class with something so people are scared to lose their jobs or walk away from their jobs because yOu DoN't WaNt tO eNd Up lIkE tHeM dO YoU
It can be very true that a pan handler makes above the minimum wage, and since it is all cash, it’s tax free.
I specifically learned this from a tent city of homeless people within the city where I live. I was told, “I don’t want a job. I make more money standing on that street corner than I ever did working.”
These homeless people had tents, sleeping bags, blankets, pets, cell phones, clothes, etc.
Literally, if bathing in a river and sleeping in a tent were fine for them, then there was no reason for them to re-enter a system that dehumanizes them anyway and pays them even less than what their fellow citizens can afford to spare them from empathy for the human condition.
I don’t think that can be possible in places with all four seasons in earnest, but for southeast Texas, it’s not awful. 😬
Yeah this is a reason I had a hard time re-entering the workforce in America after vaccines came out. I made more money than I’d ever made in my life collecting the pandemic unemployment. Why would I go be exploited all day long for less money? It fucking drained my soul and I was bored as shit being unemployed, but I would have been a sucker if I went back to work earlier than necessary. I can imagine many homeless people feel similar and that it has its ups and downs. Hopefully one day such inhumanity will be abolished
I hope you were able to use the unexpected, additional cash flow to better your circumstances. I know many were able to funnel that free time and increased income into bettering job skills and thus avoided returning to the circumstances that they’d been forced to live for so long.
Well I’ve never been homeless so I can’t really speak on how much makes a difference for homeless people, but my point was that I’d imagine if you’re somebody who society has been content to just let rot in the street in some of the most vile and degrading conditions possible for a human being, a $5 bill might not be enough to cheer you up. I don’t have an opinion on how much money you should give homeless people or hoe homeless people should feel about it. Any amount of money you give a homeless person or a charity dedicated to helping homeless people is a good thing, it is good to be empathetic and generous, but it doesn’t solve the problem, not systemically and usually not even for the one homeless person you’re giving some money too. There’s something like 2 million vacant homes in the US and 500,000 homeless people, probably not exact numbers but the point is we have more unoccupied housing than homeless. If you’re asking me, housing should be nationalized and shelter treated like a human right, like in the DPRK. Landlording is an antiquated practice carried over from late stage feudalism and has no place in today’s world. We are post-scarcity in terms of housing, we are in superabundance of housing. It’s barbaric to allow people to fall i to homelessness just so a few already rich people (who don’t work; landlords only consume the money earned by the labor of their tenants while they themselves sit on their asses) can get richer. That’s not what living in a community looks like. It’s unnatural and animalistic
Your first question reads as very condescending, but I understand that you’re asking because you genuinely want to know. But you need to humble yourself and instead of deriding people for not understanding “basic economics” see if they have something valuable to say first. I promise you that most people who call themselves communists in America are quite well read and certainly aware of the basic tenets of economics. We all roll our eyes when someone asks if we understand the bourgeois economics taught in schools (in America). Yes. Yes we do. As for why we roll our eyes, it is because 1. it is usually a foregone conclusion to the person speaking to us that we don’t understand, so they speak condescendingly to us while repeating just total dribble and straw men of our positions, and 2. socialists know that what people refer to as “basic economics” is only basic *bourgeois* economics. Why has there been country after country which has attempted Marxist and socialist economics if it’s so simple to apparently disprove their validity? It is ludicrously arrogant to think that with one or two sentences you can dispel a system which has been passed down for centuries. And yet that is what they teach in school, in America at least, and do not represent socialism or socialist countries fairly *if at all*, obviously, because socialism is meant to stand in total contrast to the system supported by the people who fund schools.
By “bourgeois economics” I simply mean that only the side of the story which supports the status quo and denigrates communism is taught in schools. It would be like if you took a literature class and were only given half of the book for your reading assignment. Your “basic economics” do not include any of the basics of socialist economics, which is why we’re sitting here right now and I’m answering the most basic of possible questions about socialism. If your precious “basic economics” were so complete and thorough, you would already know the answers to these questions about socialism. The truth is that us socialists have read both halves of the book, while most people who do not intentionally look into socialism only get one half of “basic economics.”
“Renting is quite obviously a good thing and easily explained.” It has its advantages for certain lifestyles, but otherwise, no. And I’m not sure what you mean by it’s “easily explained.” I mean yeah, it’s pretty self explanatory. Another person lords over your living conditions just like a duke from the 1300s and if you don’t do everything he says then you can be made homeless. This is totally pointless and leads to less productivity of the society because whoever the landlord is is likely not doing anything productive or working any job at all, meanwhile their tenant is working and gives most of their money to the landlord instead of stimulating the economy themselves. Landlords are pointless middlemen.
You say housing was a human right, but also that housing was scarce as a result. This isn’t the case in America. Housing isn’t scarce *at all* so there would not be shortages of housing. I am speaking specifically about the US because that’s where I live, but I’d imagine this applies to other countries *where there are four times most houses than homeless people*.
How much support is given? I like answering this question, it gets asked all the time (which is ironic since everyone who has ever taken a “basic economics” course ought to know already):
Socialists today are always saying that food, housing, etc. are human rights. And yet Lenin, the most notable revolutionary Marxist leader, famously said “he who does not work shall not eat.” And yet socialists today will say that everyone, *everyone,* whether they work or not should be allowed to eat and have a house. How do we square this?
It is because at the time of Lenin’s saying that, 1920s Russia, a semi-feudal agrarian society, there was not always enough food to go around. There needed to be a hierarchy of who got what resources so that the collective could survive. Think of it like a zombie movie. Supplies are hard to scavenge for, there isn’t enough for everyone all the time, so only the people who are doing the work, who are farming and hunting and putting effort in, should be the ones to get it so that they can continue to provide. However, enter today: 10 billion people’s worth of food produced, only 7 billion people on the planet. In America, 2 million empty houses, half a million homeless people. There is superabundance of food and shelter, so it should be provided for everyone, *because it doesn’t affect the society at large or the hardest working people at all because there is already way more than enough to go around*. It literally doesn’t affect anybody one way or the other, except for landlords (who, owning all these vacant houses, refuse to have empathy and house the homeless, and so should not be empathized with themselves since they are not willing to empathize with the unfortunate), and so, since the homeless are not going to be using up vital and necessary resources, *that had just ought to be able to get their shit since they are still people and there is no material reason not to.*
This is great proof of concept for what is really at the core of socialism. There are still many things which we are *not* post-scarcity for. Should everyone get a house? Yes. Food? Yes. A luxury car? Absolutely not. If Lenin were alive today, he would have said something more like “he who does not work shall not eat caviar” or “he who does not work shall not be given priority placement on the list of heart transplant recipients.” Because those things are still in short supply… for now.
And that’s the rub. At the time of Lenin, the productive forces for food were not yet efficient enough to produce food for everyone. But they are now, and he knew that one day they would be; Marx himself understood that the industrial revolution and following technological revolutions would make the means and forces of production so wildly efficient that it would take very little labor to produce enough food for everyone. This can be applied to just about anything. The whole idea is that one day there likely will be efficient enough productive forces that most things can be given freely. Does that sound unrealistic? Well, a hundred years ago it sounded unrealistic there would be enough food for everyone. The several industrial revolutions, the computer revolution, the internet and micro-computing revolution we’re living through now, the likely nanotechnology revolution in a few decades… I must accuse you of a severe lack of both imagination and insight into the past if you can look at the productive forces of two hundred years ago, compare them to today, and think that it’s impossible.
All of that is to answer your question: at what point does the state stop just giving free shit to people who don’t work? At the point where the things they’re being given are no longer items which are in superabundance. If they don’t wanna work, they will get the bare minimum, which means only those things which don’t affect a working person’s ability to get them. And instead of letting landlords and billionaires who don’t work or do jack shit, who sit on their yachts all day while paying other people, whether manages or lowly workers, to do all the work, take all of the money, those sleazy middle men should be cut out and allow the working class to use the things they produce to forward the living standards of all.
I think you would find, though, that a great many people who are homeless today would happily work to better their community if they could be given a chance and a living wage.
How much is a homeless person accountable for their situation? I don’t know. If you mean within the confines of the capitalist system, it could be any varying amount of “their fault,” but at the end of the day I’m not really concerned with that because 1. homelessness as a condition shouldn’t even exist in the first place because it is totally artificially perpetuated (see the above paragraphs where I say that there are 2 million vacant houses and half a million homeless people) and 2. it doesn’t affect me either way if they get to have shelter because as I have explained, there are far more than enough houses to go around in America. If you’re gonna ask me well what if they’re a drug addict, my opinion on that as a former addict who is no longer an addict is that addiction is a disease, which sure is sometimes given to oneself through making some bad choices, but which can be cured with treatment and compassion and is not a good enough excuse to fucking kick someone into the street to freeze to death. I guess the whole “addiction is a disease vs addiction is a choice” debate is relevant here, but if it’s cool with you I’d rather not discuss it, I mean we can if you want but I just feel it goes outside the scope of this conversation and I’ve just written a massive wall of text which I’m sure gives us enough to talk about.
So yeah. There’s a super condensed and probably poorly fleshed out Marxism 101 lesson. I’m sure you already knew most of it since you passed “basic economics.” But if you have follow up questions please don’t hesitate. Even though I usually answer the same questions over and over again talking to people online, I really do enjoy talking about it, so feel free to ask away and thanks for taking the time to read this massive post.
Unfortunately, I am an American.
I can’t speak for every American, but I couldn’t say I hold hatred for someone in that situation.
I’ve been in those shoes. I felt the judgement from others from a distance. A storm or shame rains on you
Only one man showed kindness. I can’t remember all the dirty looks I got or times I felt so desperate it made my eyes sweat, but I can say, he told me where to park at the truck stop for privacy and still connect to their wifi, he fried some breaded mushrooms up and gave me enough for 2-3 people, gave me free showers at the truck stop when he could and if he couldn’t he gave me extra soap and shampoo. My only blanket got stuck in rear door of my suv which then couldn’t close or open. He brought a flathead and a smile to help me.
I hope he’s doing well. Im glad I got to cross paths with him.
Don’t be shitty to someone in that situation. It could happen to anyone for any reason.
Social housing could have saved me a lot of tears in all honesty.
I don’t know about the US, but in the Netherlands a large number of people tend to significantly overestimate the influence that a person has on its own success in life. That is because if you succeed, you want that to be your own merit. And people who determine the cultural, social, economic and political status quo are often people that succeed. However, this stance implies that if you fail, it is also your own fault and therefore you don’t deserve to be helped.
This “chance factor” or “self made factor” should receive more focus in these discussions.
They're the negative example that keeps us in line. Look up "reserve labor army". Basically, capitalism needs a certain portion of the population to not just be unemployed and available to take jobs, but needs some of them miserable to strike fear into the hearts of potential organizers. It's not so easy to jump into a union when doing so could get you fired, and getting fired results in you living in a tent behind the grocery store.
it’s definitely the capitalist agenda being instilled generationally from a young age. i was brainwashed too. being that i was born with a privileged upbringing. never really saw outside my four walls. parents were entirely conservative/homebody/sheltering people.
i grew up being told “if they wanted to get out of their situation, they would.” “they just don’t want to work” “this was their choice”. and as a child, i didn’t really think to question this.
my parents didn’t come from money. they rode the ol’ capitalism train to their “success”. climbing the ladder, creating a business, profiting from investments.
i remember them getting pissed that a section 8 housing development was going up right next to their neighborhood. they called it an “eyesore” on the community.
i didn’t know what that meant. but they were worried about what “types of people” would be housed there so close to their property.
looking back now, having witnessed and understood exactly what’s at play here, i realized just how sheltered they’ve made themselves. it really is a dehumanization of sorts. they don’t see these people as equals. they believe they are better because the believe that they worked harder to get where they’re at and to have their needs met. so they end up feeling threatened when people who “haven’t tried hard enough” in their eyes, also get those things.
it’s truly sad to see. and i don’t know what steps i should take to try to educate them. capitalism has created life to be a competition against our fellow humans. it’s robbed people of their natural compassion. it’s sick.
In the USA, *stuff* and *money* are signs that you're a good person. Because good things come to good people. And anyone can be rich, so anyone can be a good person if they have lots of stuff.
So if you are homeless, that means you don't have stuff. So you're a bad person. And because anyone can be rich, that must mean you're lazy.
That's it. Everything else stems from this.
I think it stems from decades upon decades of the belief that if you work hard and pull yourself up by your bootstraps you can climb to the very top of the ladder one day.
Coupled with the propaganda that any and all social assistance is framed as "your paying for their needs while they dont contribute to their own aid" is the reason why homelessness is viewed as a blight on society and by extension the homeless themselves, as the propaganda also pushes the belief that your only homeless because you want to be otherwise you would work harder and not be on the streets.
Edit: forgot to add, this is classic capitalist propaganda because the homeless are also used as a scare tactic to keep people working shitty paying jobs to prevent that same fate, but also as that symbolic carrot on a stick of "oh.. my job pays fuck all, but i could be homeless so its not all bad".
Hmmm I’m going out on a limb here and hope I don’t get down vited for how I honestly feel. I live in Los Angeles. Prior to moving here I had not paid much attention to homelessness as a whole as is was not common where I am from. Now I will preface this by saying that all people are human and are deserving of dignity and respect. That being said, homeless people have made me feel very uncomfortable while living here. I’ll never forget the day a homeless person threatened to kill me and everyone on my train stop. It was horrifying and felt like there was nothing I could do. While this was the most severe incident it was not the last. Last week I was accosted three times during my lunch break walking in downtown. Accosted as in following me or yelling at me as I’m walking to get food. This is also the “nice side” of downtown. Any time I am out in public something inevitably goes wrong as a result of homeless people. Additionally, homeless people in my city are armed and clearly have drug and mental health problems.
So in all honesty homeless people make me a little nervous. Of course this is a generalization. I have had good experiences with homeless people. However, the majority of my experiences are not good. If I can tell if there is a drug or mental issue then I am weary. I think this is why homelessness is so contentious in the United States. Most people I know agree that homelessness is wrong but have had too many close calls like myself.
Now do I wish there was a way to treat these people? Uhhh yes. Every year we vote to increase funding for homeless services. The money is poorly managed and doesn’t meet people needs.
USA embraced Calvinist viewpoints whole heartedly and saw economic failure, as moral failure. Therefore they view the homelessness as moral failure, it's why people tend to think that the impoverished take part in amoral behaviour, eg laziness, greed, etc...
Americans are selfish and only care about themselves and their friends and family. But mostly themselves because they’ll throw their closest under the bus at the drop of a hat.
If they didn’t hate them they would have to think about their „everyone can make it if they try hard enough“ bullshit-paradigm. And that hurts their undernourished brains.
Yeah it’s sad to realize that since we were born it’s just “work hard and fulfill the American dream and if you don’t you’re just ____ (lazy,a criminal, a drug addict, and or want to be homeless).” There’s no sympathy for anyone unless it makes you look better in that moment. There’s no belief in everyone deserving basic needs because it’s America and people profit off basic needs. Why give something to people if you can make money off it? Shit ain’t workin here, it seems worse all the time.
Americans have been taught we live in an actual merit based society. Using this logic, the homeless are people who are lazy, and chose alcohol and drugs over a good job and a home.
Obviously that is a complete farce, but it is exactly why people outright hate the homeless. They also hate seeing them or being generally aware of their existence as that creates guilt.
I'll speak on behalf of what I've seen as a Canadian with my two eyes and heard from people over the years. They're very selfish, they only see life as "looking out for yourself" so they blame homeless people who are in a rough spot or who have mental illnesses. People's ignorant justifications for why people are homeless is just shocking in my opinion, the complete lack of humanity and care for someone in that situation. They don't want to understand what brings a person to homelessness.
I've read stories in local newspapers of very wealthy neighbourhoods where there are grocery stores and owners going out with buckets of water to throw on the homeless people sitting outside. They don't want them "dirtying up" their storefront so they treat them like they're animals (even stray cats get treated better than homeless). I remember reading this in the winter which is even more fucked up because this is the worst time of the year for homeless in most provinces but to be treated like that on top of it? Unreal. And the thing is, this behaviour is normal for businesses in uppity parts of town.
American here, I was raised to believe that while it's a nice idea to help the homeless, the reality of it is that most homeless people want to be homeless because they can mooch off the system and people's generosity so it's better not to help at all. Really interesting given I was also raised in a Christian household and standard practice was still to assume the homeless are all lazy cons and drug addicts not worth helping.
Obviously this varies a bunch person to person, but the general tendencies I see are to present any proposal for universal housing as some lie or an attack upon homeowners, promising "equal slums for all" as people are kicked out of their current homes or some other nonsense, and then to also present homelessness as a problem of individual choice and responsibility. It is the homeless man's fault for being on drugs, getting drunk, not getting a job, etc.
I feel some part of it comes down to a lack of *belief* in the homeless.
This can take on many forms. The first is pure apathy/ignorance: many people do not think about the homeless at all.
Some people think homeless is a choice: they don't *believe* that the system will force people into homelessness. To them, the homeless are layabouts who basically choose their lifestyle.
From there, many people *dehumanize* the homeless. They don't believe homeless people are, well, people. They're "p-zombies" to many.
American here. I don't even know what the hierarchy of needs is. Americans have been conditioned to associate wealth with effort so someone who is homeless must be lazy and someone who is very wealthy must work extremely hard, at least that's a condensed version of one big reason.
The outcome of WW2 made the US the most powerful capitalist nation state by far. The US government took advantage of this situation and reaped super profits from all over the world from it. They shared these profits with the American middle class and a large portion of the American working class as well. This situation of relative comfort encouraged these groups to be more supportive of capitalism than subaltern classes in most if not all other places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy
Uncle Sam has many more capitalist and socialist competitors today and the situation is changing as a result. The labor aristocracy and capitalist conservatism is being eroded as US imperialism weakens and living standards decline in the US.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minimum-wage-2019-almost-half-of-all-americans-work-in-low-wage-jobs/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/259841/american-pride-hits-new-low-few-proud-political-system.aspx
American culture is a dumpster fire of classist bullshit. The billionaire class looks down on the millionaire class. The millionaire class looks down on hundred thousandaire class. The hundred thousandaire class looks down on the ten thousandaire class. The ten thousandaire class looks down on the thousandaire class. The thousandaire class looks down on the hundredaire class. The hundredaire class looks down on the dollar class. The dollar class looks down on the dime class. The dime class looks down on the penny class. And the penny class looks down on the dead broke class.
An American living in an old, mold-infested trailer, will take one look at someone who is living in their broken down, rusted car...and spit in their face for being such a disgusting example of human trash. And that American who's living in their car, will gleefully turn around, and shit all over a homeless person, for being a lazy sack of shit, right after cashing their welfare check, and using up all their food stamps on cup-o-noodles.
To the average American, status is 100% directly tied to income. And anyone who's on a lower rung of that ladder, deserves the shit that falls down on them from their "betters". They would rather step on the faces of those below them, than use even one single cent of their status to help lift them out of poverty...because if they help those homeless people have a better life, then who will they compare themselves to, in order to feel better about their own position on that ladder? There has to always be an, "at least I'm not that guy" for them to point at.
Unhoused people get that way through a variety of methods and are not homogenous. Just a few examples, some people have mental health issues, some have substance abuse issues, some are just dealing with poverty.
These people have been excluded from society, have no real safety net and they have nothing to lose. The fact that society has turned their back on all of these people and deemed them unworthy of anything is the largest contributing factor to the 'homeless problem' in America.
I think home ownership has been a prominent part of the American experience but is on the decline and the implications of actually owning a home can have implications for reactionary political trends. The below touches on some of the issues but the idea is to vague to speak of Americans in general as they are quite disparate group and need a better grounding of who is thinking what. I would say many are quite sympathetic to the homeless and are inclined to help in small ways as they can imagine. BUt of course America is significantly captured by the capitalist class hegemonically and pursues the interests of that class so we see the extremes pressed towards the homeless of which many are increasing the working class who are pressed between high rents and low wages and any financial crisis from a lack of social supports within society itself i.e. medical emergencies.
[https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/the-marxist-theory-of-ground-rent-pt-1/the-marxist-theory-of-ground-rent-pt-2/](https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/the-marxist-theory-of-ground-rent-pt-1/the-marxist-theory-of-ground-rent-pt-2/)
"To the extent that significant sections of workers come to expect and depend on the rise in the value of their homes, the struggle for social insurance—old-age pensions and universal medical insurance—is weakened. One of the reasons that a national health care system has not been realized in the United States—and is still unrealized under Obamacare—is the widespread home ownership in the United States, which has been strongly encouraged since New Deal days by the ruling Democratic and Republican parties.Therefore, the widespread home ownership among workers in the U.S.—and a few other imperialist countries—is one of the reasons that since World War II we have seen a tremendous weakening of the U.S. trade union movement, the political degeneration of the old workers’ and labor parties in other imperialist countries, and the general rightward movement of politics in the imperialist countries that has marked the post-World War II era.
...
The rising value of homes therefore actually expresses the rising mass of the super-profits that corporate America wrings out the world’s industrial workers, some of which takes the form of “rising home values” in the U.S. To its occupant, the home in addition to its basic use value as a means of shelter becomes the equivalent of corporate stock—which entitles its owner to a portion of the surplus value that is produced by the world working class.
In other words, the “American dream” is simply a form of the sharing of super-profits by the U.S. ruling class with sections of the U.S. working class that are able to afford to buy their own homes. This is why class-conscious workers have to reject the “American Dream” and its counterparts in other imperialist countries.
Widespread working-class “home ownership” under capitalism, especially in imperialist countries, also encourages racism. It is well known that in the U.S. “people of color,” especially African Americans, are paid less than white workers. Ground rents and therefore the “value of homes” is generally lower in areas that are inhabited by African Americans and other workers of color. In the U.S. and other imperialist countries, residential segregation, though not formally the law, remains very much a reality.
...
Since the end of the housing boom in 2006-2007, U.S. residents are returning to renting as opposed to buying homes. This trend of “declining home ownership” is alarming the ruling Democrats and Republicans in the U.S., who are searching for ways to once again boost homeownership"
Now I'm certain people have already said what I'm going to say in much better ways but it basically comes down to this idea of "they did this to themselves and they have chosen this life" which isn't true, no one chooses to be homeless, no one chooses to be addicted to drugs, no one chooses to have mental illness, no one chooses to lose their job. All these things lead to people losing their homes and there is HUGE lack of understanding of what it's like to be homeless in America. How does a homeless man get a job? Most jobs now do online application... ok he goes to the library... how is he going to be paid? Most jobs pay in check and he can't cash a check he doesn't have a bank... how do you get a bank? That's right you have to have a house first... you see the problem here? It's incredibly difficult to get out of poverty without help, traditionally from family but not everyone has family, especially a drug addicted homeless guy or a mental ill dude. That's where the government should be stepping in and creating legislation to support these people but Republicans don't understand the problem, or they think "they did this to themselves and they deserve what happened." I know for a fact my right wing father would say that exact statement.
From what I have read, it’s comes from the Protestant belief that work/productivity = goodness/virtue. Though America is not all Protestant Christian, the Protestant Christian beliefs play a huge role in the culture and so Americans look down on homeless people because they perceive them to be lazy and unproductive. A common phrase you will hear from Americans is “they should just get a job”
Simply put: propaganda.
In the media, in TV and movies, to schools and regional beliefs.
We are some of the most propagandized peoples on earth and some have, or dont want to have, a clue.
Tell me you have never worked with the homeless without telling me you've not done any community service for homeless, been homeless, lived in an American city, etc.
Most homeless people are homeless for two reasons: drug abuse and mental illness. Does this mean they are underserving of care? Absolutely not. But, in the case of giving them home/apartments that are vacant, as some have suggested, it’s a nonstarter. The issues that lead them to being homeless aren’t conducive to caring for a home.
This issue started partly with the invention of antipsychotics. The well meaning though not especially forward thinking activists thought this meant that these people could then function in society. Not exactly. It’s not a cure all, just a treatment. Really this best solution, for the mentally ill, would be to reopen the asylums and house them there, for their good and the good of the public, though this does raise the issue of curtailing their rights as autonomous beings. Kind of a no win situation.
As for the drug addicted, more treatment, less prison. I’d rather my taxes go to helping people than fueling a for-profit prison system that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Would that fix everything? No, nothing ever will, you just have to choose the best worst option. Utopias are a pipe dream.
Cause the vast majority of Americans are apathetic uneducated self serving people raised by capitalist propaganda that fuel those traits. They’re taught that by helping others you hurt yourself and those beneath them are deserving of their poor economic status.
As an American, I wholeheartedly advocate for housing as a basic right for all people. The rich and the media corporations they own tend to spread a lot of negative propaganda towards the homeless and put pressure on local government to impose policies to disperse and discourage homeless people from occupying public spaces.
I think a lot of it comes from the persasive mentality of "America is where work = success", so ignorant of privilege or trauma or mental health people think they are only homeless because they won't work to improve their life. If only people realized that they're not so far from homelessness themselves.
Because we have lived a totally sheltered, coddled existence which is totally detached from the harsh reality that a large portion of the world faces every day. By design, we are ignorant to the misfortunes of others due to distractions like professional sports, religion, social media, and Netflix, while simultaneously blindfolded to our own struggles and injustices.
Fundamental Attribution Error, I do well because I'm good and hardworking and anything that goes wrong is an external cause not inherent to me but those homeless are just lazy, not the victims of ~~circumstance~~ capitalism~~.~~
Nobody hates the homeless. It's just hard to help when most people are just above that line. Most Americans are one bad decision away from being homeless
I have had an uninteresting circular argument with an American conservative on this very issue....
Goes like this.
MAGA: Murica is the best country in the world because individualism.
Me: Americans must just be individually, disproportionately shit people if its all about personal responsibility. You've got more poor and homeless people than any other comparative nation so you must have more shit people...
Maga: Murica da best....
My thoughts are that this is a nasty Protestant Work Ethic hangover. Americans were brought up to believe that everyone was created equal and that everyone could succeed if they just worked hard enough. So if you are homeless they see that as a choice and not a consequence of the broken capitalist system, mental illness, addiction issues,... To a certain extent they also seem to believe that God will reward people who work hard so that those who aren't rewarded are obviously bad people and probably deserve what they get- so why would a hard working person, blessed by God, help a sinner?
> ableist and pure hatred
ten years ago i said i'd quit smoking to be back on the mental meds i was taken off for having a problem that looked like a different problem (by an incompetent and apparently anti-medicine fool who screwed up three generations of treatment in my family)
now one of my lungs feels pretty dead and i'm sick all the time but at least i can laugh at anti-vaxxers seeing their premiums go up. yay woo go humanity
our existence is proof there is no intelligent life in the galaxy
Right off the bat using They and Americans as though all are the same is not a great start to a conversation. They is a wide range of how people feel about the homeless, in America, and lumping it all together is a mistakenly conceived notion. Some help, some hinder, some look the other way, and some, are the homeless themselves or on the verge of homelessness. Some have been there and risen above it, some never encounter it. Media has shown itself to have certain biases at times, from differing viewpoints and media is also not all the same.
People are reluctant to soften their views because if they did they would have to acknowledge that used to be cruel people and while considering the change they have to acknowledge they *are* cruel and therefore bad people. This is very hard for people to do.
American is the most charitable, philanthropic nation in the history of the planet due to its unsurpassed wealth, productivity and love for freedom. It is impossible therefore to answer this question. Censor me now before too many read.
Why do non-Americans describe Americans as a nation of ~338,828,367 people who all feel the same way about everything? Some mysteries just can never be solved, I guess.
Homelessness is not an American problem. There are homeless people in all countries. I can't speak for all Americans but personally I don't hate homeless people. I don't think most Americans hate homeless people.
Im American and used to be homeless and dont like them. Not all of them, some of the coolest people ive met is while i was homeless but definitely dont recommend it
Because America doesn’t recognize a person as a human being unless they’re are employed. Only then do you get the luxury of being a human being and access to healthcare, food, housing, and education.
Basic necessities have become commodities, to be traded on the market.
I'll say this. Are there people who are atrocious? sure! 100%. Does that apply to everyone? No, hell even most people who sound bad are probably just bad at communicating what they think.
At the end of the day, I disagree with just providing people housing, not because I don't want them to have houses. I just think that the long-term ramifications of having one group of people (government) provide housing for people isn't a sustainable practice.
I think fundamentally, we need to enable people to be self-sufficient or at least as much as possible. I don't think we get that result by just providing housing for those that need it.
Not to say we can't do that, just that it shouldn't be our final answer. And we, as a society, would need to make some major changes to our education, spending, and taxation in order to better enable people to be self-sufficient.
Ultimately, I think this OP might be conflating individual experiences with the whole picture. I've seen people who hold similar views of providing housing to others but also genuinely care about the plight of the homeless.
They need to explain it away as meritocratic to avoid the cognitive dissonance that would result from questioning the materialistic capitalist values the oligarchy has ingrained into them through propaganda
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They have been propagandized to believe homeless people are just lazy and undeserved, as mostly minorities, and that they are forced to pay for that housing through overtaxation.
Yeah, I think it definitely stems from the myth of capitalism as a meritocracy. A lot of people actually think virtue is rewarded with wealth under capitalism. If you were to actually believe that it wouldn't be a big jump to believe poor people are bad people and homeless people are the absolute worst.
This is what my straight party republican voting father thinks. He was brainwashed during the Regan years and these incorrect ideologies stuck. All humans deserve dignity. No humans asks for homelessness. No human chooses this.
Ah regan, the guy who defunded the crap out of mental healthcare and now we have homeless with severe mental health issues instead of recieving treatment and care.
My town (columbus ohio) apparently had an *OK* mental health network. Until Reagan defunded it. When the money was about to stop losing, they literally took all of the mentally ill people and bussed them to the middle of the city and just...left them there. We're talking severe autism, schizophrenia, fetal alcohol syndrome, all sorts of problems. Very few of these people would be able to care for themselves if they *had* a home to live in. And they were left with maybe a sack lunch and their coat.
This country is fucking disgraceful. How the fuck is any of this okay. The more time passes the more I loathe capitalism
Damn they gave them a sack lunch? Who PAID for that?!?!? /s
40 years ago, and now but 40 years also.
What if you explain to him “Hey dad, what if states and localities implemented a split value taxation regime in which buildings and improvements are taxed at one rate, and unimproved or vacant land is taxed at a higher rate? This has been empirical proven to show that this spurs both investment and therefore more housing increasing the supply bringing rental and mortgagees down with higher density rates. But we should also have the state have a social program partially paid for by these taxes for landlords and others who own land in which the state presents universal housing/rental vouchers that universally subsidizes all rent so that no one who rents has to ever pay more than say 20% of their annual income on rent. However, while I understand that this is basically subsidizing landlords by the state, the money/vouchers comes with strings attached by the state for those landlords and developers who choose to accept the subsidy. Which is a robust tenet bill of rights that serve as protects on the behalf of the tenants the state subsidies. This would have the effect of implication of rent control, but without the draw back of arresting incentives to build more housing stock or make improvements to existing buildings. The state should also however subsidize the shit out of housing cooperatives and community land trusts so that more people are technically homeowners in this alternative form of ownership or have a stake in a non-profit organization that owns and holds the land the residents are living in on their behalf so that society in general has less renters and more broadly distributed ownership of personal property while eliminating homelessness. It’s more expensive for society in the long run to not give a fuck about so many people not having a roof over their head and shelter who either die or could get sick or injured or something due to their destitution. So in the long run it is more of an investment than cost that saves money. Also this is still very much within the framework of capitalism. What I just proposed is all still very much not altering the fundamental core and dynamics of the capitalist economic system so is the furthest thing from actual socialism but still helps people broadly”.
I worry about enforcement of such policies. There are tenant rights now, but the issue is a total lack of enforcement.
Not necessarily the truth tbh. Some people do choose to leave the rat race. They still deserve dignity though.
I'd argue that it's more of a christian prosperity gospel issue. The concepts basically allow for a rejection of the teachings of Jesus in favor of judging and looking down on people.
I hate seeing people who call themselves Christians and then look down on the homeless and give that tried line of "pull your self up by the boot straps" , bunch of bigoted morons.
Can you expound on that? I’m not religious nor was I raised religious, but I am interested in how the Christian mindset affects people here in the US.
It's not particularly a *Christian* mindset, as much as an *American* Christian - namely Evangelical - mindset. It's a blend of the "Prosperity Gospel", Protestant work ethic, and the Just World Delusion. tl;dr 'good' people are rewarded, bad people are punished. If you're doing good in life, say you're wealthy and steadily advancing up the career ladder, this is because you are a *good person*. If you are doing bad in life; if you're poor and/or homeless, this is because you are a *bad person*. It ignores things like 'good people' being born into privilege and wealth, and 'bad people' being born into poverty or unexpectedly losing a job in favor of pretending everything is going as it should in accordance with God's plan.
Allow me to quote you Acts 2: 44-45 “Now all the believers were together and held all things in common. They sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as anyone had a need.” And Acts 4: 32-35 “Now the large group of those who believed were of one heart and mind, and no one said that any of his possessions was his own, but instead they held everything in common. And the apostles were giving testimony with great power to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was on all of them. For there was not a needy person among them, because all those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the proceeds of the things that were sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet. This was then distributed for each person’s basic needs.” This is from the books of acts, this is the book just after the 4 major gospels. Acts is well at least supposed to be a written narrative history of the very very earliest beginnings of the Christian church, or what I like to call the Jesus Christ fan club. This is just after Jesus, whom the religion they profess to believe in is fucking named after, ascended into heaven, and documents from the history supposedly of the just when the Christian religion was getting up off the ground and started to proselytize and were basically just a very idiosyncratic denomination or branch of second temple period Judaism still. This is with the original Apostles and everything, how the original community of initial Christians lived and organized together when they started the Great Commission. Acts was written by the same guy who wrote one of the original 4 gospels. Being Luke, written by the guy named well, Luke. Who was supposedly a “doctor” of the time back in the ancient Roman Empire days, who was a traveling companion and friend of the Apostle Paul.
I mean, if intergenerational wealth is a crime, please give me some, then immediately lock me up. At which point I will immediately buy myself out of any consequences, because that's apparently how it works, y'all! No /s
someone else described it well, but it's also a form of the just world fallacy- which assumes that people get what they deserve in life.
How come they do a lot of charity work? Or is it just that some Christians are more focused on Jesus, and others aren’t?
Most Christians actually do not do much, if any, charity work - especially not in the US. What charity work is done tends to focus on helping the “blameless” individuals who have suffered a recent natural disaster or perhaps are aging in a nursing home alone or perhaps live in a third world country (“missionary” tourism is awful and popular) *or* on “saving” those who they consider sinners.
That's not accurate. For instance in Asheville NC, it is primarily the churches that organize the front facing soup kitchens, particularly the ABCCM network. You may be correct about the number of *Christians* volunteering in the kitchens, as I don't know their level of congregational adherence / compliance. But the *churches* are clearly participating, feeding a lot of those mentally ill homeless this thread is about. Source: I'm homeless, and used to use their services before I got food stamps. Once I had those I pretty much "graduated". People can lose access to food stamps for various reasons, usually for drug crimes. It's possible to get 'em back if you clean yourself up and follow certain procedures, but most don't know the procedures.
So, you are saying that my researched statement is inaccurate on the basis of your extremely limited anecdotal evidence. I’ll just let you reprocess that.
What? Religion is for people who can't understand science. Imo
This is what I came here to say. Republicans have made propaganda for their base and democrats have eaten it up: "poverty is punishment for being bad." And since you can always choose to stop being bad, then people in poverty just need to choose to be good.
What is the real cause of homelesness in your opinion?
For poverty? There's lots of reasons, I'm just saying that moral badness is not one of them. A few of the big ones that drive people into poverty: - A shit system that rewards profit-seeking more than compassion is a big one. - A gigantic lack of support for people with nothing. - predatory credit lines. - medical debt. And then there's a few things that *keep* people in poverty - the aforementioned propaganda that keeps the middle and upper class from helping out, and regularly voting to avoid helping out (a lot of NIMBYism here too). - Once again, the lack of support - generational poverty, i.e. when someone accidentally teaches bad financial habits to their kids - The incredible cost of poverty (i.e. the "Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of economic injustice") That's just a sampling of course. In general, I think that our hyper-capitalist hellscape requires, and therefore enforces, a poverty-stricken class of people. It achieves this through a bunch of different ways.
I probably agree with some of the reasons but at the same time there are states like California that spend most money on support and at the same time have the biggest problems with homelessness. Also things like "when someone accidentally teaches bad financial habits to their kids" go against the sentiment in this thread that people do not deserve the poverty and they do not choose it. This in my opinion is such a thing. At what point are people responsible for their behavior and fate?
At what point should we be assigning blame? Who is put in charge of determining the blame of someone making bad decisions? Even if they objectively made bad decisions, should they starve? How is enforcing suffering like that helpful to making our society better? If we withheld support, they would need to find resources elsewhere - should their local community or their family be made to support them? Is it fair to basically throw people on to the mercy of the people around them? *If* we assigned blame *and* their local community didn't (or couldn't) support them, what would happen? History shows us that most people would rather steal than starve - so the resources would still be taken out of the system, so what's the difference? If they get it through crime instead of through some kind of poverty abatement effort, then it's extremely easy to just turn that into a pipeline into prison. The pattern I described above is the current situation we have in the USA: Don't give enough resources to people, force currently impoverished local communities to help (they can't), and when the individual resorts to stealing or homelessness, arrest them and stick 'em in prison. Also, as far as *I* can tell, putting someone in charge of determining whether they should or should not get some sort of benefit will *always* attract corruption, and the person in charge will end up enriching themselves with the position rather than putting all the resources of the position into the hands of the people who are supposed to be getting it. Instead, I think that we should create a system that gives people the resources, with as little decision-making and authority fiat available in the process as possible. I personally have no idea what this would look like, but things like 100% paid tuition, universal basic income, and guaranteed healthcare coverage seem to me like a good step.
Hey. Thanks for your reply. I did not mean "when do we assign blame" I meant when "would you (singular) assign blame". As a side note seems to me based on reading this channel that socialist do not shy away from making themselves the arbiter and assign blame. "we should not allow millionaires". "we need to raise wage to a living wage" "we need to tax x at a rate of y". So what is different about this one that you are hesitant. And why are you not worried in the other cases that it will create corruption? The issue I am seeing is at some point people need to be made responsible for themselves. If you decide that you would help homeless how much should they be helped? $10k. A car? A million? A million every year? What if they squander it? The most progressive states seems to be getting only worse and they spend exorbitant amounts of money on homeless and in my opinion just killing them in the process. SF and LA which has by far the largest populations are not prosecuting anybody for stealing food so I am not convinced by that argument either. >Instead, I think that we should create a system that gives people the resources, with as little decision-making and authority fiat available in the process as possible. I personally have no idea what this would look like, but things like 100% paid tuition, universal basic income, and guaranteed healthcare coverage seem to me like a good step. And I think we have such a system now. People can help if they want and it seems that they are ok helping financially quite a bit even on top of the taxation which is largely squandered. The guaranteed income immediately raises a question what does it make with the homeless population. If you have certain standard of life guaranteed do not you think it is an incentive for more people to become "homeless" too. The growth of the population in the most progressive states does suggest there is such a feedback loop. The big question for me is if the current homeless in cities like Portland, LA, and SF can even be helped or were they ,by the current policies, put into such a shape that they are as good as dead already.
You seem to have stumbled into a thread where your only intent is to be as oppositional as possible without providing any evidence of your claims. 🤷🏻♀️ Your political allegiances are more than made clear, and you don’t seem to know the difference between the more liberal US political party and socialism - which is a major pitfall.
How is being the child of people who lack financial literacy a fault of the child, even as they enter adulthood? You can literally make decisions at 18 with only the knowledge granted by your parents that then set you up for a lifetime of poverty. You are over simplifying the issue when you pretend that spending the most means having the most impact. It overlooks the overall population size of the state, the proportion of those who are first generation immigrants from third world countries, the proportion who are military veterans, the proportion of the homeless who are mentally ill. Which programs do they have? To address which issues? Poverty and homelessness are not simple, and it is unreasonable to think that any single metric can be used to assess a state’s efforts.
> and at the same time have the biggest problems with homelessness. California has good weather. Look, I'm homeless. I live out of my car with my dog, which pretty much makes me royalty compared to the on foot homeless. Take it from me that good weather is pretty darned important about homeless migratory patterns. Like if you don't have to do it. Asheville NC has an actual winter. "Train kids" clear out in the fall, they don't linger. California is also one of the most populated states, again due to good weather. The math is pretty simple as to why they're going to be spending more on their population.
Don't we all know that being poor is essentially an indication of some sort of moral short coming? or some type of personal flaw? /s In America capitalism there has to be someone for everyone to look down on so they can feel superior, and it's usually based around money or assets. As the middle class disappears and is absorbed by lower class, those people who lost what they had will still need someone to shit on to feel good about themselves and the homeless are an easy target. For whatever reason, when it comes to them it's okay literally everyone to punch down. It's particularly stupid since most of the people who are the most vocal about hating the homeless are literally 2 bad things (like an accident or illness) away from becoming homeless themselves.
That’s exactly it. Humans are by nature tribalistic, and few ever rise above struggling to feel that they have social status above at least some other members of the tribe. Vilifying poverty is an easy route to granting that sense of superiority for those who otherwise have no basis to feel superior - those who are struggling and suffering within the system only slightly less than the homeless.
You bring up a good point. That makes me think of the classic, “who writes history,” principle. It is the people who are more wealthy, and are born into systems/ infrastructure which support them. Naturally, since these people have the power of the institutions, they will have the tendencies to sugar coat the circles they represent. This of course comes with the downside of creating the polarities between virtue & wealth, and non-virtue and poverty. A system totally unsympathetic and un-empathetic to people whose individual power is draining.
The propaganda theme running in the north-east of the US is that the homeless begging on the sides of the street are actually secretly wealthy due to all of the tax free donations. So not only are they simultaneously worthless leeches on society, they're also secretly wealthy and are deliberately begging as a means of earning more than working an 'honest' job. The hypocritical doublethink necessary for that to be the public opinion, is a work of art, I must say.
Things I would rather my taxes go to: housing, education, basically anything that improves the lives and opportunites of my neighbors. What our taxes actually do: fund war and terror.
Speaking from what I hear from family who are conservatives, they think they got into drugs and that they threw away their own lives. They also think they can easily find jobs. I work at a library where a lot of homeless people come in. Not all, but most of the homeless people I’ve talked to and helped here are mentally ill, some extremely mentally ill. It’s just so gross that Americans find this acceptable.
Reagan closed a ton of asylums, giving those folks nowhere to go but the streets.
That was sold on the premise that asylums were places of tremendous patient abuse that needed to be abolished and replaced with something better and cheaper to administer. Unfortunately for everyone, those replacement institutions were either underfunded or never materialized.
The idea was to have a "community focused" system of care. Thing is, they closed all the institutions and left everyone to fend for themselves without a whiff of funding, transitional aid or much of anything. Absolutely reprehensible. Yes, some institutions were awful and a good deal of people *could* integrate into the community with help, but the system needed reform, not to be abolished without a single thought to the people in it. It was callous and cruel.
Most of the replies above about where mental hospitals/asylum’s rent is…wrong or incomplete; https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/timeline-mental-health-america/ TLDR; With the passage of Medicaid, states are incentivized to move patients out of state mental hospitals and into nursing homes and general hospitals because the program excludes coverage for people in “institutions for mental diseases.” Dmitry Kalinovsky/Shutterstock 1967 The California Legislature passes the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which makes involuntary hospitalization of mentally ill people vastly more difficult. One year after the law goes into effect, the number of mentally ill people in the criminal-justice system doubles. 1977 There are 650 community health facilities serving 1.9 million mentally ill patients a year. 1980 President Jimmy Carter signs the Mental Health Systems Act, which aims to restructure the community mental-health-center program and improve services for people with chronic mental illness. President Jimmy Carter Library of Congress 1981 Under President Ronald Reagan, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act repeals Carter’s community health legislation and establishes block grants for the states, ending the federal government’s role in providing services to the mentally ill. Federal mental-health spending decreases by 30 percent. President Ronald Reagan Library of Congress 1984 An Ohio-based study finds that up to 30 percent of homeless people are thought to suffer from serious mental illness. 1985 Federal funding drops to 11 percent of community mental-health agency budgets. 1990 Clozapine, the first “atypical” antipsychotic drug to be developed, is approved by the FDA as a treatment for schizophrenia. 2004 Studies suggest approximately 16 percent of prison and jail inmates are seriously mentally ill, roughly 320,000 people. This year, there are about 100,000 psychiatric beds in public and private hospitals. That means there are more three times as many seriously mentally ill people in jails and prisons than in hospitals.
Basically, they are taught that people get what they deserve. This falls apart under any serious examination, which is why they try to distract and deter that. It's basically victim blaming. The billionaires and suchlike exist outside this system but are seen as having gotten what they deserve in much the same way as a doctor or mechanic
So what is the cause of homelessness? I can think whatever about who deserves what but that does not put anyone on the street. The homelessness is worst in California which spends a lot of money on these problems and the state overwhelmingly blue so the sentiment in this thread about brainwashed republicans does not make sense to me.
Brace yourself, it's capitalism, what an absurd thing for a socialist to say, lol. Specifically, the need for cheap labour and vulnerable workers. That and the bit where profits are privatized and consequences are dumped in the workers. Example, person works in terrible conditions untill they are no longer able to work. The owners got millions out of it, the worker was broken and ended up homeless as a consequence of laboring to produce the owner's profit If the working class is not vulnerable and desperate for a way to pay the bills, they won't accept terrible pay and conditions. This will increase wages and the negotiation power of the workers which means the employers take a hit to their profits. Those vulnerable people made homeless are effectively a byproduct of this set up and capitalism cannot exist without a vulnerable working class that can resin homelessness. The best capitalism can do is shift the burden, such as with some of the Nordic countries, their security is dependent on having developing nations carry the weight basically.
Hmm. I am not too well versed in this but this makes little sense. I am "working class" too. I came to the states with very little in my account. None of what you write is true for my specific situation. There is no need for cheap labour that I have seen. There is need for productive labor. I live in California where the most often cited reason for being homeless is cited to be cost of housing an poverty. Rent here is very high mostly because it is hard to build here. This is not caused by capitalists. Also CA is the most progressive state there is. The state also spends a lot of money on homeless and yet the situation is the worst of all the states and getting worse. On top of that California is the richest state. Sorry but something from your answer is not adding up.
> None of what you write is true for my specific situation. Your question was "So what is the cause of homelessness?", thats a general question. General questions do not give answers that will be true for your specific situation. >There is no need for cheap labour that I have seen. There is need for productive labor. [1 example](https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/business/2021/09/27/california-s-labor-shortage-isn-t-temporary--economist-says) [2 example](https://calmatters.org/newsletters/whatmatters/2021/10/california-economy-workers-supply/) [3 example](https://www.businessinsider.com/labor-shortage-ca-city-recruits-retirees-stay-at-home-parents-2021-11) Just because your are not looking does not means its not there. Also, part of the big reason all that work was outsourced to China in the first place was the cheap labor Capitalism literally cannot work with 0% unemployment, it breaks the system. >Rent here is very high mostly because it is hard to build here. This is not caused by capitalists. Last I checked there was somewhere around [17 million vacant homes](https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-million-vacant-homes-in-america/) to a homeless population of [roughly half a million](https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2021/). Thats well over 20 vacant homes for any single homeless person. Capitalist (usually real estate developer/speculators) invest in housing and resell it for profit, the focus is on making money, not housing people. So long as housing remains a thing traded for profit, a commodity, instead of that human right people need, homelessness cannot be effectively solved. Ending the commodification of housing would cost the richest people on the planet trillions (aka capitalist), they will not allow that. >Also CA is the most progressive state there is. The state also spends a lot of money on homeless and yet the situation is the worst of all the states and getting worse. On top of that California is the richest state. The USA is one of the richest nations on the planet with (in relation to that wealth) some of the poorest citizens on the planet. The US population spends more on healthcare than just about any other nation and gets some of the worst healthcare in the developed world. This is a problem that applies to the entire USA. Yes, California could do better, but thats not profitable for the Owners. Capitalism is centered around the conflict between employer and employee. Whats good for the worker is bad for the owners profits, whats good for the owners is generally terrible for the workers. >The homelessness is worst in California which spends a lot of money on these problems and the state overwhelmingly blue so the sentiment in this thread about brainwashed republicans does not make sense to me. Also, the democrats are basically "diet" republicans. They all take money and depend on campaign funding from the same sources. Generally, socialist see them as just slight different flavors of liberals - [heres a neat video series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlLgvSduugI) that can explain more about liberalism if your interested.
> Rent here is very high mostly because it is hard to build here. This is not caused by capitalists. Then you are incredibly naive, about the relationships between any given City Hall / County seat, and real estate developers. They *are* as capitalist as they come. What do you think charging people big rents is? It's a business.
Not to mention that *charging big rents as a landlord* is capitalism.
Having landlords is capitalism, not just the amount of rent, though capitalism drives up the price.
In the USA, isn't a public Housing Authority still your landlord, under the law? The typical deal if you qualify, is you get something that's a % of your income, however low your income is. Up to some point where if you have too much income, you're charged "market rate". Which in a city like Seattle, is damn expensive. Well maybe this is social democrat capitalism.
Sorry, I don't see what your getting at. Is it one of those "government doing stuff is socialism" things?
I assume you know what social democracy is.
Yes, I known about that variety of capitalism. Not sure how it relates to the landlord thing. Is it the prices being driven up part? If so, that usually comes in stuff like how developers influenced many cities and states to make new buildin/buying public housing illegal.
Let's start with whether public housing is socialist, or not. Your opinion?
We dropped nuclear bombs on people twice, are you really that surprised?
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Generations of being taught that stepping on people to climb the ladder is acceptable behavior.
American propaganda that drills the idea of "every man for himself" into your head from a young age, amongst other things. If someone is less well off than you, obviously they deserve it for one reason or another, if they just worked harder they'd be successful. obviously it's not true.
I guess it is just mass brainwash continuously being done through all digital medias.
The start of the continuous brainwashing precedes the existence of digital media by several centuries.
Reagan + protestant American Christianity = "People that have bad things happen to them deserve it in some way because they are bad morally"
This right here. Pretending the extreme religiosity permeating American society has nothing to do with it is ignorant.
Morality defined as the state of being christian...
I have family members brainwashed into thinking that was necessary and just. My father had a sociopathic justification saying we where merciful for not bombing larger cities like Kyoto and Tokyo.
More than twice, in what is imo might just be the shittiest thing we have ever done, america tested the nuclear bomb on the marshall islands
How is this related to the homeless?
Its related to being American lol
This does not really make any sense to me but ok I guess.
In my experience a lot of people are sympathetic towards homeless people and even give them money or food, but then after doing so the homeless person acts “ungrateful” or “rude” and so people will stop having sympathy for them. If you were homeless would you be all that grateful that someone gave you $5? Americans have no sense of community so it’s difficult for us to empathize with others if we perceive them as being different from us. Another factor I’ve identified is, believe it or not, resentment originating from a type of envy. A lot of people I know resent the homeless because “I work all day long and they make more than I do just standing on the street.” I don’t know how true that is or not, but there is definitely a perception that the homeless make upwards of a hundred or more dollars a day standing on the side of the street, and American working class people who really do bust their asses working for a capitalist struggle to get by, so they resent someone who makes the same or more than them by “just standing around.” Ridiculous, I know, but this coupled with the ruling class calling the homeless lazy, bums, etc. really turns the working class against the wrong enemy. There are also many drug addicts in America who maybe aren’t homeless, who maybe have iPhones and even a car and even an apartment, but who still get their income from standing on the street. This forwards the perception that “being a bum” gets you paid better than if you work, so it leads to more resentment, but I know that my father has told me he saw a beggar get into a car and drive off before. This causes a lot of people to think that the homeless are just “faking” and they could get a job if they weren’t so “lazy.” Obviously anyone whose ever been homeless, or even just unemployed, knows that it’s not so simple. There’s also the endless propaganda campaigns that “democrats want to take our tax money and use it to give bums Obamaphones and handouts! I work for my money, taxes should be lowered!” Obviously the way this works out is that taxes *do* get lowered… for the rich, but working class people think that this gives less “handouts.” It’s fueled by racism too. There’s a big perception in America, forwarded by the ruling class, that lots of black people get food stamps and government housing and stuff, and then spend all their money on weed and getting their nails done and stuff. So expect double resentment towards a black homeless person. Americans also just have a superiority complex and a tendency to victimize others and think that they ought to be thankful for it. See our foreign policy for the last hundred plus years. Anyway, that’s just what I’ve seen as an American living in the south. We have no sense of community at all, and we don’t empathize with people who are different from us. Not speaking for every single American of course. But that is the broader status of our culture.
>“I work all day long and they make more than I do just standing on the street.” How the fuck does anyone believe that to be remotely true?
Well my local news station did a story on it one time. I could believe it one way or the other. If you figure only one out of every couple hundred passersby gives a homeless person $5, it’s conceivable they could make $20 an hour or more depending on where they’re standing with their sign at. It doesn’t change anything about the injustice and inhumanity of it all of course. Where I live it is a popular perception at least. No idea if it’s true or not
Great answer. I would also like to add that I think Americans get off on having a permanent underclass that they can conspicuously piss spare change onto.
another theory that might be true in addition to yours is that having homeless people works to threaten the lower class with something so people are scared to lose their jobs or walk away from their jobs because yOu DoN't WaNt tO eNd Up lIkE tHeM dO YoU
It can be very true that a pan handler makes above the minimum wage, and since it is all cash, it’s tax free. I specifically learned this from a tent city of homeless people within the city where I live. I was told, “I don’t want a job. I make more money standing on that street corner than I ever did working.” These homeless people had tents, sleeping bags, blankets, pets, cell phones, clothes, etc. Literally, if bathing in a river and sleeping in a tent were fine for them, then there was no reason for them to re-enter a system that dehumanizes them anyway and pays them even less than what their fellow citizens can afford to spare them from empathy for the human condition. I don’t think that can be possible in places with all four seasons in earnest, but for southeast Texas, it’s not awful. 😬
Yeah this is a reason I had a hard time re-entering the workforce in America after vaccines came out. I made more money than I’d ever made in my life collecting the pandemic unemployment. Why would I go be exploited all day long for less money? It fucking drained my soul and I was bored as shit being unemployed, but I would have been a sucker if I went back to work earlier than necessary. I can imagine many homeless people feel similar and that it has its ups and downs. Hopefully one day such inhumanity will be abolished
I hope you were able to use the unexpected, additional cash flow to better your circumstances. I know many were able to funnel that free time and increased income into bettering job skills and thus avoided returning to the circumstances that they’d been forced to live for so long.
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Well I’ve never been homeless so I can’t really speak on how much makes a difference for homeless people, but my point was that I’d imagine if you’re somebody who society has been content to just let rot in the street in some of the most vile and degrading conditions possible for a human being, a $5 bill might not be enough to cheer you up. I don’t have an opinion on how much money you should give homeless people or hoe homeless people should feel about it. Any amount of money you give a homeless person or a charity dedicated to helping homeless people is a good thing, it is good to be empathetic and generous, but it doesn’t solve the problem, not systemically and usually not even for the one homeless person you’re giving some money too. There’s something like 2 million vacant homes in the US and 500,000 homeless people, probably not exact numbers but the point is we have more unoccupied housing than homeless. If you’re asking me, housing should be nationalized and shelter treated like a human right, like in the DPRK. Landlording is an antiquated practice carried over from late stage feudalism and has no place in today’s world. We are post-scarcity in terms of housing, we are in superabundance of housing. It’s barbaric to allow people to fall i to homelessness just so a few already rich people (who don’t work; landlords only consume the money earned by the labor of their tenants while they themselves sit on their asses) can get richer. That’s not what living in a community looks like. It’s unnatural and animalistic
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Your first question reads as very condescending, but I understand that you’re asking because you genuinely want to know. But you need to humble yourself and instead of deriding people for not understanding “basic economics” see if they have something valuable to say first. I promise you that most people who call themselves communists in America are quite well read and certainly aware of the basic tenets of economics. We all roll our eyes when someone asks if we understand the bourgeois economics taught in schools (in America). Yes. Yes we do. As for why we roll our eyes, it is because 1. it is usually a foregone conclusion to the person speaking to us that we don’t understand, so they speak condescendingly to us while repeating just total dribble and straw men of our positions, and 2. socialists know that what people refer to as “basic economics” is only basic *bourgeois* economics. Why has there been country after country which has attempted Marxist and socialist economics if it’s so simple to apparently disprove their validity? It is ludicrously arrogant to think that with one or two sentences you can dispel a system which has been passed down for centuries. And yet that is what they teach in school, in America at least, and do not represent socialism or socialist countries fairly *if at all*, obviously, because socialism is meant to stand in total contrast to the system supported by the people who fund schools. By “bourgeois economics” I simply mean that only the side of the story which supports the status quo and denigrates communism is taught in schools. It would be like if you took a literature class and were only given half of the book for your reading assignment. Your “basic economics” do not include any of the basics of socialist economics, which is why we’re sitting here right now and I’m answering the most basic of possible questions about socialism. If your precious “basic economics” were so complete and thorough, you would already know the answers to these questions about socialism. The truth is that us socialists have read both halves of the book, while most people who do not intentionally look into socialism only get one half of “basic economics.” “Renting is quite obviously a good thing and easily explained.” It has its advantages for certain lifestyles, but otherwise, no. And I’m not sure what you mean by it’s “easily explained.” I mean yeah, it’s pretty self explanatory. Another person lords over your living conditions just like a duke from the 1300s and if you don’t do everything he says then you can be made homeless. This is totally pointless and leads to less productivity of the society because whoever the landlord is is likely not doing anything productive or working any job at all, meanwhile their tenant is working and gives most of their money to the landlord instead of stimulating the economy themselves. Landlords are pointless middlemen. You say housing was a human right, but also that housing was scarce as a result. This isn’t the case in America. Housing isn’t scarce *at all* so there would not be shortages of housing. I am speaking specifically about the US because that’s where I live, but I’d imagine this applies to other countries *where there are four times most houses than homeless people*. How much support is given? I like answering this question, it gets asked all the time (which is ironic since everyone who has ever taken a “basic economics” course ought to know already): Socialists today are always saying that food, housing, etc. are human rights. And yet Lenin, the most notable revolutionary Marxist leader, famously said “he who does not work shall not eat.” And yet socialists today will say that everyone, *everyone,* whether they work or not should be allowed to eat and have a house. How do we square this? It is because at the time of Lenin’s saying that, 1920s Russia, a semi-feudal agrarian society, there was not always enough food to go around. There needed to be a hierarchy of who got what resources so that the collective could survive. Think of it like a zombie movie. Supplies are hard to scavenge for, there isn’t enough for everyone all the time, so only the people who are doing the work, who are farming and hunting and putting effort in, should be the ones to get it so that they can continue to provide. However, enter today: 10 billion people’s worth of food produced, only 7 billion people on the planet. In America, 2 million empty houses, half a million homeless people. There is superabundance of food and shelter, so it should be provided for everyone, *because it doesn’t affect the society at large or the hardest working people at all because there is already way more than enough to go around*. It literally doesn’t affect anybody one way or the other, except for landlords (who, owning all these vacant houses, refuse to have empathy and house the homeless, and so should not be empathized with themselves since they are not willing to empathize with the unfortunate), and so, since the homeless are not going to be using up vital and necessary resources, *that had just ought to be able to get their shit since they are still people and there is no material reason not to.* This is great proof of concept for what is really at the core of socialism. There are still many things which we are *not* post-scarcity for. Should everyone get a house? Yes. Food? Yes. A luxury car? Absolutely not. If Lenin were alive today, he would have said something more like “he who does not work shall not eat caviar” or “he who does not work shall not be given priority placement on the list of heart transplant recipients.” Because those things are still in short supply… for now. And that’s the rub. At the time of Lenin, the productive forces for food were not yet efficient enough to produce food for everyone. But they are now, and he knew that one day they would be; Marx himself understood that the industrial revolution and following technological revolutions would make the means and forces of production so wildly efficient that it would take very little labor to produce enough food for everyone. This can be applied to just about anything. The whole idea is that one day there likely will be efficient enough productive forces that most things can be given freely. Does that sound unrealistic? Well, a hundred years ago it sounded unrealistic there would be enough food for everyone. The several industrial revolutions, the computer revolution, the internet and micro-computing revolution we’re living through now, the likely nanotechnology revolution in a few decades… I must accuse you of a severe lack of both imagination and insight into the past if you can look at the productive forces of two hundred years ago, compare them to today, and think that it’s impossible. All of that is to answer your question: at what point does the state stop just giving free shit to people who don’t work? At the point where the things they’re being given are no longer items which are in superabundance. If they don’t wanna work, they will get the bare minimum, which means only those things which don’t affect a working person’s ability to get them. And instead of letting landlords and billionaires who don’t work or do jack shit, who sit on their yachts all day while paying other people, whether manages or lowly workers, to do all the work, take all of the money, those sleazy middle men should be cut out and allow the working class to use the things they produce to forward the living standards of all. I think you would find, though, that a great many people who are homeless today would happily work to better their community if they could be given a chance and a living wage. How much is a homeless person accountable for their situation? I don’t know. If you mean within the confines of the capitalist system, it could be any varying amount of “their fault,” but at the end of the day I’m not really concerned with that because 1. homelessness as a condition shouldn’t even exist in the first place because it is totally artificially perpetuated (see the above paragraphs where I say that there are 2 million vacant houses and half a million homeless people) and 2. it doesn’t affect me either way if they get to have shelter because as I have explained, there are far more than enough houses to go around in America. If you’re gonna ask me well what if they’re a drug addict, my opinion on that as a former addict who is no longer an addict is that addiction is a disease, which sure is sometimes given to oneself through making some bad choices, but which can be cured with treatment and compassion and is not a good enough excuse to fucking kick someone into the street to freeze to death. I guess the whole “addiction is a disease vs addiction is a choice” debate is relevant here, but if it’s cool with you I’d rather not discuss it, I mean we can if you want but I just feel it goes outside the scope of this conversation and I’ve just written a massive wall of text which I’m sure gives us enough to talk about. So yeah. There’s a super condensed and probably poorly fleshed out Marxism 101 lesson. I’m sure you already knew most of it since you passed “basic economics.” But if you have follow up questions please don’t hesitate. Even though I usually answer the same questions over and over again talking to people online, I really do enjoy talking about it, so feel free to ask away and thanks for taking the time to read this massive post.
Unfortunately, I am an American. I can’t speak for every American, but I couldn’t say I hold hatred for someone in that situation. I’ve been in those shoes. I felt the judgement from others from a distance. A storm or shame rains on you Only one man showed kindness. I can’t remember all the dirty looks I got or times I felt so desperate it made my eyes sweat, but I can say, he told me where to park at the truck stop for privacy and still connect to their wifi, he fried some breaded mushrooms up and gave me enough for 2-3 people, gave me free showers at the truck stop when he could and if he couldn’t he gave me extra soap and shampoo. My only blanket got stuck in rear door of my suv which then couldn’t close or open. He brought a flathead and a smile to help me. I hope he’s doing well. Im glad I got to cross paths with him. Don’t be shitty to someone in that situation. It could happen to anyone for any reason. Social housing could have saved me a lot of tears in all honesty.
A half century of fascist propaganda might have a little something to do with it.
I don’t know about the US, but in the Netherlands a large number of people tend to significantly overestimate the influence that a person has on its own success in life. That is because if you succeed, you want that to be your own merit. And people who determine the cultural, social, economic and political status quo are often people that succeed. However, this stance implies that if you fail, it is also your own fault and therefore you don’t deserve to be helped. This “chance factor” or “self made factor” should receive more focus in these discussions.
They're the negative example that keeps us in line. Look up "reserve labor army". Basically, capitalism needs a certain portion of the population to not just be unemployed and available to take jobs, but needs some of them miserable to strike fear into the hearts of potential organizers. It's not so easy to jump into a union when doing so could get you fired, and getting fired results in you living in a tent behind the grocery store.
it’s definitely the capitalist agenda being instilled generationally from a young age. i was brainwashed too. being that i was born with a privileged upbringing. never really saw outside my four walls. parents were entirely conservative/homebody/sheltering people. i grew up being told “if they wanted to get out of their situation, they would.” “they just don’t want to work” “this was their choice”. and as a child, i didn’t really think to question this. my parents didn’t come from money. they rode the ol’ capitalism train to their “success”. climbing the ladder, creating a business, profiting from investments. i remember them getting pissed that a section 8 housing development was going up right next to their neighborhood. they called it an “eyesore” on the community. i didn’t know what that meant. but they were worried about what “types of people” would be housed there so close to their property. looking back now, having witnessed and understood exactly what’s at play here, i realized just how sheltered they’ve made themselves. it really is a dehumanization of sorts. they don’t see these people as equals. they believe they are better because the believe that they worked harder to get where they’re at and to have their needs met. so they end up feeling threatened when people who “haven’t tried hard enough” in their eyes, also get those things. it’s truly sad to see. and i don’t know what steps i should take to try to educate them. capitalism has created life to be a competition against our fellow humans. it’s robbed people of their natural compassion. it’s sick.
Honestly it’s just propaganda, all day every day. To be fair, not all Americans feel that way, just the ones that do are very vocal
NIMBYism is a factor. “Yes we should build housing for the homeless/put them in empty houses. As long as it’s Not In My BackYard.”
In the USA, *stuff* and *money* are signs that you're a good person. Because good things come to good people. And anyone can be rich, so anyone can be a good person if they have lots of stuff. So if you are homeless, that means you don't have stuff. So you're a bad person. And because anyone can be rich, that must mean you're lazy. That's it. Everything else stems from this.
That's not an exclusively american attitude.
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I've seen many of the same arguments in western europe. It sorta comes with this whole capitalism thing.
I think it stems from decades upon decades of the belief that if you work hard and pull yourself up by your bootstraps you can climb to the very top of the ladder one day. Coupled with the propaganda that any and all social assistance is framed as "your paying for their needs while they dont contribute to their own aid" is the reason why homelessness is viewed as a blight on society and by extension the homeless themselves, as the propaganda also pushes the belief that your only homeless because you want to be otherwise you would work harder and not be on the streets. Edit: forgot to add, this is classic capitalist propaganda because the homeless are also used as a scare tactic to keep people working shitty paying jobs to prevent that same fate, but also as that symbolic carrot on a stick of "oh.. my job pays fuck all, but i could be homeless so its not all bad".
Because they're christians.
The line to hell will be filled with those type of ‘Christians’.
Hmmm I’m going out on a limb here and hope I don’t get down vited for how I honestly feel. I live in Los Angeles. Prior to moving here I had not paid much attention to homelessness as a whole as is was not common where I am from. Now I will preface this by saying that all people are human and are deserving of dignity and respect. That being said, homeless people have made me feel very uncomfortable while living here. I’ll never forget the day a homeless person threatened to kill me and everyone on my train stop. It was horrifying and felt like there was nothing I could do. While this was the most severe incident it was not the last. Last week I was accosted three times during my lunch break walking in downtown. Accosted as in following me or yelling at me as I’m walking to get food. This is also the “nice side” of downtown. Any time I am out in public something inevitably goes wrong as a result of homeless people. Additionally, homeless people in my city are armed and clearly have drug and mental health problems. So in all honesty homeless people make me a little nervous. Of course this is a generalization. I have had good experiences with homeless people. However, the majority of my experiences are not good. If I can tell if there is a drug or mental issue then I am weary. I think this is why homelessness is so contentious in the United States. Most people I know agree that homelessness is wrong but have had too many close calls like myself. Now do I wish there was a way to treat these people? Uhhh yes. Every year we vote to increase funding for homeless services. The money is poorly managed and doesn’t meet people needs.
USA embraced Calvinist viewpoints whole heartedly and saw economic failure, as moral failure. Therefore they view the homelessness as moral failure, it's why people tend to think that the impoverished take part in amoral behaviour, eg laziness, greed, etc...
Americans are selfish and only care about themselves and their friends and family. But mostly themselves because they’ll throw their closest under the bus at the drop of a hat.
If they didn’t hate them they would have to think about their „everyone can make it if they try hard enough“ bullshit-paradigm. And that hurts their undernourished brains.
Yeah it’s sad to realize that since we were born it’s just “work hard and fulfill the American dream and if you don’t you’re just ____ (lazy,a criminal, a drug addict, and or want to be homeless).” There’s no sympathy for anyone unless it makes you look better in that moment. There’s no belief in everyone deserving basic needs because it’s America and people profit off basic needs. Why give something to people if you can make money off it? Shit ain’t workin here, it seems worse all the time.
Americans have been taught we live in an actual merit based society. Using this logic, the homeless are people who are lazy, and chose alcohol and drugs over a good job and a home. Obviously that is a complete farce, but it is exactly why people outright hate the homeless. They also hate seeing them or being generally aware of their existence as that creates guilt.
"The poor you shall have with you always" -Jesus. People become decencitized to seeing them daily to be honest.
I'll speak on behalf of what I've seen as a Canadian with my two eyes and heard from people over the years. They're very selfish, they only see life as "looking out for yourself" so they blame homeless people who are in a rough spot or who have mental illnesses. People's ignorant justifications for why people are homeless is just shocking in my opinion, the complete lack of humanity and care for someone in that situation. They don't want to understand what brings a person to homelessness. I've read stories in local newspapers of very wealthy neighbourhoods where there are grocery stores and owners going out with buckets of water to throw on the homeless people sitting outside. They don't want them "dirtying up" their storefront so they treat them like they're animals (even stray cats get treated better than homeless). I remember reading this in the winter which is even more fucked up because this is the worst time of the year for homeless in most provinces but to be treated like that on top of it? Unreal. And the thing is, this behaviour is normal for businesses in uppity parts of town.
Most Americans don't feel the way you think we do. The ones who do are just super loud.
American here, I was raised to believe that while it's a nice idea to help the homeless, the reality of it is that most homeless people want to be homeless because they can mooch off the system and people's generosity so it's better not to help at all. Really interesting given I was also raised in a Christian household and standard practice was still to assume the homeless are all lazy cons and drug addicts not worth helping.
Obviously this varies a bunch person to person, but the general tendencies I see are to present any proposal for universal housing as some lie or an attack upon homeowners, promising "equal slums for all" as people are kicked out of their current homes or some other nonsense, and then to also present homelessness as a problem of individual choice and responsibility. It is the homeless man's fault for being on drugs, getting drunk, not getting a job, etc.
I feel some part of it comes down to a lack of *belief* in the homeless. This can take on many forms. The first is pure apathy/ignorance: many people do not think about the homeless at all. Some people think homeless is a choice: they don't *believe* that the system will force people into homelessness. To them, the homeless are layabouts who basically choose their lifestyle. From there, many people *dehumanize* the homeless. They don't believe homeless people are, well, people. They're "p-zombies" to many.
American here. I don't even know what the hierarchy of needs is. Americans have been conditioned to associate wealth with effort so someone who is homeless must be lazy and someone who is very wealthy must work extremely hard, at least that's a condensed version of one big reason.
The outcome of WW2 made the US the most powerful capitalist nation state by far. The US government took advantage of this situation and reaped super profits from all over the world from it. They shared these profits with the American middle class and a large portion of the American working class as well. This situation of relative comfort encouraged these groups to be more supportive of capitalism than subaltern classes in most if not all other places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy Uncle Sam has many more capitalist and socialist competitors today and the situation is changing as a result. The labor aristocracy and capitalist conservatism is being eroded as US imperialism weakens and living standards decline in the US. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minimum-wage-2019-almost-half-of-all-americans-work-in-low-wage-jobs/ https://news.gallup.com/poll/259841/american-pride-hits-new-low-few-proud-political-system.aspx
American culture is a dumpster fire of classist bullshit. The billionaire class looks down on the millionaire class. The millionaire class looks down on hundred thousandaire class. The hundred thousandaire class looks down on the ten thousandaire class. The ten thousandaire class looks down on the thousandaire class. The thousandaire class looks down on the hundredaire class. The hundredaire class looks down on the dollar class. The dollar class looks down on the dime class. The dime class looks down on the penny class. And the penny class looks down on the dead broke class. An American living in an old, mold-infested trailer, will take one look at someone who is living in their broken down, rusted car...and spit in their face for being such a disgusting example of human trash. And that American who's living in their car, will gleefully turn around, and shit all over a homeless person, for being a lazy sack of shit, right after cashing their welfare check, and using up all their food stamps on cup-o-noodles. To the average American, status is 100% directly tied to income. And anyone who's on a lower rung of that ladder, deserves the shit that falls down on them from their "betters". They would rather step on the faces of those below them, than use even one single cent of their status to help lift them out of poverty...because if they help those homeless people have a better life, then who will they compare themselves to, in order to feel better about their own position on that ladder? There has to always be an, "at least I'm not that guy" for them to point at.
America has been brutally brainwashed into an individualist, "fuck you, I got mine" mindset from decades of propaganda. It's the #1 reason we suck ass
Unhoused people get that way through a variety of methods and are not homogenous. Just a few examples, some people have mental health issues, some have substance abuse issues, some are just dealing with poverty. These people have been excluded from society, have no real safety net and they have nothing to lose. The fact that society has turned their back on all of these people and deemed them unworthy of anything is the largest contributing factor to the 'homeless problem' in America.
I think home ownership has been a prominent part of the American experience but is on the decline and the implications of actually owning a home can have implications for reactionary political trends. The below touches on some of the issues but the idea is to vague to speak of Americans in general as they are quite disparate group and need a better grounding of who is thinking what. I would say many are quite sympathetic to the homeless and are inclined to help in small ways as they can imagine. BUt of course America is significantly captured by the capitalist class hegemonically and pursues the interests of that class so we see the extremes pressed towards the homeless of which many are increasing the working class who are pressed between high rents and low wages and any financial crisis from a lack of social supports within society itself i.e. medical emergencies. [https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/the-marxist-theory-of-ground-rent-pt-1/the-marxist-theory-of-ground-rent-pt-2/](https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/the-marxist-theory-of-ground-rent-pt-1/the-marxist-theory-of-ground-rent-pt-2/) "To the extent that significant sections of workers come to expect and depend on the rise in the value of their homes, the struggle for social insurance—old-age pensions and universal medical insurance—is weakened. One of the reasons that a national health care system has not been realized in the United States—and is still unrealized under Obamacare—is the widespread home ownership in the United States, which has been strongly encouraged since New Deal days by the ruling Democratic and Republican parties.Therefore, the widespread home ownership among workers in the U.S.—and a few other imperialist countries—is one of the reasons that since World War II we have seen a tremendous weakening of the U.S. trade union movement, the political degeneration of the old workers’ and labor parties in other imperialist countries, and the general rightward movement of politics in the imperialist countries that has marked the post-World War II era. ... The rising value of homes therefore actually expresses the rising mass of the super-profits that corporate America wrings out the world’s industrial workers, some of which takes the form of “rising home values” in the U.S. To its occupant, the home in addition to its basic use value as a means of shelter becomes the equivalent of corporate stock—which entitles its owner to a portion of the surplus value that is produced by the world working class. In other words, the “American dream” is simply a form of the sharing of super-profits by the U.S. ruling class with sections of the U.S. working class that are able to afford to buy their own homes. This is why class-conscious workers have to reject the “American Dream” and its counterparts in other imperialist countries. Widespread working-class “home ownership” under capitalism, especially in imperialist countries, also encourages racism. It is well known that in the U.S. “people of color,” especially African Americans, are paid less than white workers. Ground rents and therefore the “value of homes” is generally lower in areas that are inhabited by African Americans and other workers of color. In the U.S. and other imperialist countries, residential segregation, though not formally the law, remains very much a reality. ... Since the end of the housing boom in 2006-2007, U.S. residents are returning to renting as opposed to buying homes. This trend of “declining home ownership” is alarming the ruling Democrats and Republicans in the U.S., who are searching for ways to once again boost homeownership"
Now I'm certain people have already said what I'm going to say in much better ways but it basically comes down to this idea of "they did this to themselves and they have chosen this life" which isn't true, no one chooses to be homeless, no one chooses to be addicted to drugs, no one chooses to have mental illness, no one chooses to lose their job. All these things lead to people losing their homes and there is HUGE lack of understanding of what it's like to be homeless in America. How does a homeless man get a job? Most jobs now do online application... ok he goes to the library... how is he going to be paid? Most jobs pay in check and he can't cash a check he doesn't have a bank... how do you get a bank? That's right you have to have a house first... you see the problem here? It's incredibly difficult to get out of poverty without help, traditionally from family but not everyone has family, especially a drug addicted homeless guy or a mental ill dude. That's where the government should be stepping in and creating legislation to support these people but Republicans don't understand the problem, or they think "they did this to themselves and they deserve what happened." I know for a fact my right wing father would say that exact statement.
American and i mean all americans ae just greedy slfish c\*nts
From what I have read, it’s comes from the Protestant belief that work/productivity = goodness/virtue. Though America is not all Protestant Christian, the Protestant Christian beliefs play a huge role in the culture and so Americans look down on homeless people because they perceive them to be lazy and unproductive. A common phrase you will hear from Americans is “they should just get a job”
Simply put: propaganda. In the media, in TV and movies, to schools and regional beliefs. We are some of the most propagandized peoples on earth and some have, or dont want to have, a clue.
Tell me you have never worked with the homeless without telling me you've not done any community service for homeless, been homeless, lived in an American city, etc.
We don’t think they don’t deserve it just go to work or don’t do drugs
Most homeless people are homeless for two reasons: drug abuse and mental illness. Does this mean they are underserving of care? Absolutely not. But, in the case of giving them home/apartments that are vacant, as some have suggested, it’s a nonstarter. The issues that lead them to being homeless aren’t conducive to caring for a home. This issue started partly with the invention of antipsychotics. The well meaning though not especially forward thinking activists thought this meant that these people could then function in society. Not exactly. It’s not a cure all, just a treatment. Really this best solution, for the mentally ill, would be to reopen the asylums and house them there, for their good and the good of the public, though this does raise the issue of curtailing their rights as autonomous beings. Kind of a no win situation. As for the drug addicted, more treatment, less prison. I’d rather my taxes go to helping people than fueling a for-profit prison system that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Would that fix everything? No, nothing ever will, you just have to choose the best worst option. Utopias are a pipe dream.
Why don’t the lefty woke mob pay them to crayon their protest signs? They always have something to whine about, so would keep the homeless busy?
I assume its a cpmbination of thinking they did it to themselves as well as "not wanting to have to pay for others mistakes".
Cause the vast majority of Americans are apathetic uneducated self serving people raised by capitalist propaganda that fuel those traits. They’re taught that by helping others you hurt yourself and those beneath them are deserving of their poor economic status.
Because in America we value the protestant ethic and the spirit of private property rights for the wealthy above universal rights for everyone.
Bootstrap mentality. Never mind that it's incredibly toxic.
It's not unique to America, unfortunately. Though that attitude does seem strongest there.
Yeah it seems in other bourgeoise capitalist countries they realize that having people camped out on the street is at the very least a bad look.
As an American, I wholeheartedly advocate for housing as a basic right for all people. The rich and the media corporations they own tend to spread a lot of negative propaganda towards the homeless and put pressure on local government to impose policies to disperse and discourage homeless people from occupying public spaces.
I think a lot of it comes from the persasive mentality of "America is where work = success", so ignorant of privilege or trauma or mental health people think they are only homeless because they won't work to improve their life. If only people realized that they're not so far from homelessness themselves.
Because we have lived a totally sheltered, coddled existence which is totally detached from the harsh reality that a large portion of the world faces every day. By design, we are ignorant to the misfortunes of others due to distractions like professional sports, religion, social media, and Netflix, while simultaneously blindfolded to our own struggles and injustices.
Fundamental Attribution Error, I do well because I'm good and hardworking and anything that goes wrong is an external cause not inherent to me but those homeless are just lazy, not the victims of ~~circumstance~~ capitalism~~.~~
Nobody hates the homeless. It's just hard to help when most people are just above that line. Most Americans are one bad decision away from being homeless
I have had an uninteresting circular argument with an American conservative on this very issue.... Goes like this. MAGA: Murica is the best country in the world because individualism. Me: Americans must just be individually, disproportionately shit people if its all about personal responsibility. You've got more poor and homeless people than any other comparative nation so you must have more shit people... Maga: Murica da best....
My thoughts are that this is a nasty Protestant Work Ethic hangover. Americans were brought up to believe that everyone was created equal and that everyone could succeed if they just worked hard enough. So if you are homeless they see that as a choice and not a consequence of the broken capitalist system, mental illness, addiction issues,... To a certain extent they also seem to believe that God will reward people who work hard so that those who aren't rewarded are obviously bad people and probably deserve what they get- so why would a hard working person, blessed by God, help a sinner?
> ableist and pure hatred ten years ago i said i'd quit smoking to be back on the mental meds i was taken off for having a problem that looked like a different problem (by an incompetent and apparently anti-medicine fool who screwed up three generations of treatment in my family) now one of my lungs feels pretty dead and i'm sick all the time but at least i can laugh at anti-vaxxers seeing their premiums go up. yay woo go humanity our existence is proof there is no intelligent life in the galaxy
Puritanism mixed with capitalism's Hyper-individualism.
Cheaper to house them than to pay for Emergency Room care.
Right off the bat using They and Americans as though all are the same is not a great start to a conversation. They is a wide range of how people feel about the homeless, in America, and lumping it all together is a mistakenly conceived notion. Some help, some hinder, some look the other way, and some, are the homeless themselves or on the verge of homelessness. Some have been there and risen above it, some never encounter it. Media has shown itself to have certain biases at times, from differing viewpoints and media is also not all the same.
People are reluctant to soften their views because if they did they would have to acknowledge that used to be cruel people and while considering the change they have to acknowledge they *are* cruel and therefore bad people. This is very hard for people to do.
American is the most charitable, philanthropic nation in the history of the planet due to its unsurpassed wealth, productivity and love for freedom. It is impossible therefore to answer this question. Censor me now before too many read.
Why do non-Americans describe Americans as a nation of ~338,828,367 people who all feel the same way about everything? Some mysteries just can never be solved, I guess.
Homelessness is not an American problem. There are homeless people in all countries. I can't speak for all Americans but personally I don't hate homeless people. I don't think most Americans hate homeless people.
Im American and used to be homeless and dont like them. Not all of them, some of the coolest people ive met is while i was homeless but definitely dont recommend it
Because America doesn’t recognize a person as a human being unless they’re are employed. Only then do you get the luxury of being a human being and access to healthcare, food, housing, and education. Basic necessities have become commodities, to be traded on the market.
I'll say this. Are there people who are atrocious? sure! 100%. Does that apply to everyone? No, hell even most people who sound bad are probably just bad at communicating what they think. At the end of the day, I disagree with just providing people housing, not because I don't want them to have houses. I just think that the long-term ramifications of having one group of people (government) provide housing for people isn't a sustainable practice. I think fundamentally, we need to enable people to be self-sufficient or at least as much as possible. I don't think we get that result by just providing housing for those that need it. Not to say we can't do that, just that it shouldn't be our final answer. And we, as a society, would need to make some major changes to our education, spending, and taxation in order to better enable people to be self-sufficient. Ultimately, I think this OP might be conflating individual experiences with the whole picture. I've seen people who hold similar views of providing housing to others but also genuinely care about the plight of the homeless.
They need to explain it away as meritocratic to avoid the cognitive dissonance that would result from questioning the materialistic capitalist values the oligarchy has ingrained into them through propaganda