On the topic of Homelessness, as usual another country found the solutions were not actually that complicated.
I’m again reminded of Starbucks - who has decided to make it more difficult to sit, lest homeless people find it comfortable there and stay for hours. So what did Finland do? Simply make a “living room” style place for people “sleeping rough”. Hmmm … basic, easy solution to Starbucks problem and I’ll bet in Finland Coffee shops have comfortable chairs to sit in like I remember 10 years ago.
Speaking of Finland, I’m supporting Lene Rachel Andersen’s upcoming US tour (Feb. 2024) to promote the release of the Nordic Secret v. 2.0.
A useful question, of course, is to what extent can social policy of the Nordic countries translate directly to the US context? There are obvious differences in national size, composition, history, culture, etc. I post a lot in Lene’s organization’s social media, acting as a sort of US correspondent underlining factors that in my view, make the US a different sort of place than the EU countries.
Against that background, the biggest thing working against “housing first” in the US is geographical mobility, coupled with federalism. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that my area (Seattle, roughly) went all in on “housing first” in an effort to become the US answer to Finland. (I would honestly love for that to happen - if there were some way to make it work). Sounds good, but what would stop masses of unhoused people from all over the country to relocate to take advantage of that, overwhelming whatever number of housing units get constructed, and creating a whole new set of campers to replace those moved into transitional housing? This does not even factor in international migration.
To be like Finland, it seems a nation really literally needs to be like Finland. Relatively small, relatively self contained, relatively cohesive. Much as a I hate to agree with anything coming out of Texas nowadays, to get that kind of social cohesion on a community level in the US, you really do need to build a wall. If not a physical wall, at least some of sort highly chiseled virtual wall defining who is “in” and who is “out”. The more conservative parts of the US tend to use religion (and race) for that in/out marker. Which explains a lot. The more progressive parts of the US want to be theoretically open to anyone. Nice vision, lousy economics. A more “integral” sort of progressivism - which is in fact my personal agenda - is going to need to leverage that second tier superpower of embracing prior levels like red, amber, and orange to make some hard decisions about how far and wide to spread the social safety net. To take care of someone in particular at the end of the day means making choices and not spreading resources to everyone in general.
Finland as a member of the EU has open borders with all the other EU countries, so I don’t see the difference. Not only that but also assisted the border countries by assisting migrants to get north from countries in crisis like Italy and Greece.
The fact is the unhoused don’t tend to migrate en mass unless a government or organization provides them with transport, or their existing circumstances are deadly enough to try fitting 500 people on a dingy to sail from Africa to Europe.
I don’t think it’s the geography. It’s more that the society has a whole has similar concepts as to what is right and what is wrong and do not make up excuses as we tend to in the USA when morality conflicts with a few dollars.
You said it yourself - “lousy economics”, which is choosing to prioritize one type of economic benefit for some rather than choosing morality first. Ironically, the belief that it is expensive to provide for the poor is only spin, not actual economics. If a real accountant looks at all long term and short term costs rather than entertainers looking at short term surface data - it’s just an mathematical fact applied to undergraduate level accounting: providing safe and clean housing is more cost effective than cleaning up toxic materials from homeless camps, and moreover it is cheaper to keep homeless people healthy with affordable preventative care and medication than to pay for acute emergency room care and inpatient hospitalization. This goes all the way back to the saying “a stitch in time saves nine”, so it is a very basic and fundamental concept.
Of course, the opposing morality is “money is for rich people” and if we want to pay for these things to give to the poor, then you cannot have obscenely rich people in society. So there are no billionaires in Finland and if you talk to Finns, they will be ok with that. In their morality, they question why should they pay for amputating limbs of frostbite victims while billionaires get richer? In the USA we wonder why we should provide food to pregnant women if it decreases a billionaires income from 10 billion to 9 billion. The argument goes that if taxes are raised to comfort the poor, billionaires will move somewhere else, and again the Finns are ok with that. Linus Torvalis made a superior Operating system than Bill Gates, and he is content to not be a billionaire. His net worth is only $55 million but almost every server in the world uses code derived from Open source code of the LINUX OS or it’s brother, UNIX. Torvalis is an example of how a member of a responsible an moral society should think, instead of the USA / Bill Gates model of “first destroy every competitor unwilling to be bought and drive them out of business - and then after ruling the world, retire and donate 1% of one’s ill gotten gains to assuage a guilty conscience”.
I don’t think we should give a pass to ideas like “giving the poor food / shelter / medicine is expensive” because such ideas only deal with immediate costs, not long term costs. In this case the moral choices are also the wiser choices economically for the largest number of people in the long term. Providing these things for the poor is only more expensive if the prevailing morality is to keep the rich rich at all costs, as it is in the USA.
In considering your latest, I thought about doing a big Lower Right systemic deep dive into housing, homelessness, and comparative policies the world over. After a Google search or two or twenty, I realized that’s not what I’m here for. So you can have the final world on this topic from the point of view of content.
From the point of view of process, what I realized is the only way I want to engage on such topics is at a local or at most a regional level. Something like an “Integral Crisis Response Team”, but focused on specific local communities. Also, it won’t just be “integral”. I’m finding that effective action communities can be philosophically pluralistic, at least up to a point. So in so far as integral theory informs local action models, it will be because local actors bring that perspective to the projects. Others will bring other perspectives, and that’s likely all for the best.
Indeed. Even within my state, the Capital seems to be mired in big programs and somewhat paralyzed while in certain rural areas people are taking matters into their own hands - even violating laws such as zoning and land use laws. Such violations are accepted at the local community level and not reported. Quite the opposite, these communities see the value of keeping their property values below a certain level and not attractive to the rich. They know that when the rich see their community land as valuable, the rich will take it. As a result, we have a portion of my state where people live off grid without electricity in open-air shacks. The people who live there are fine with that and they have convinced the rest of the state to more or less leave them alone and not try to “fix” it. A live volcano that destroys housing communities every two decades or so also helps with that.
My own individual view on the matter is that being homeless for a time can be a spiritual journey and there are many who have intentionally started along that path. Of course this is a pretty microscopic minority, but it’s important to point out that that there is nothing particularly bad about not living in a typical house. It can also be an opportunity for people to really save a very large amount of money in a very short time, which is the subject of many Youtube channels.
There is a Hindu spiritual practice where among other things, for a period of 40 days one begs for all one’s food and expresses gratitude for anything one receives. The beauty of this is that if this practice was common, you would never be able to know if a beggar was actually poor or just spiritual. You give either way - either to feed a person in need or to feed a person building the spirituality of the planet. The key is that the giver is unable to judge the beggar as less than. The beggar may very well be an enlightened being or even as rich as Gautama.
My local city council meets tomorrow and on its agenda are its legislative priorities (things it want to lobby the state legislature on). You can see from this list where housing/homelessness fits into the general scheme of things.
Enhance Public Safety (police recruitment, auto theft, property crime, police pursuit, juvenile justice, drug possession)
Support Local Government Sustainability (1% property tax cap -the city wants more “flexibility”)
Support Sustainable Housing (tax exemptions for seniors and low income home owners. Tax relief to support middle income home and condo ownership)
Maintain Local Control over Community Planning (context - the legislature recently mandated more high-density development, overriding most local zoning laws)
Modify Sex Offender Placement Laws
There are not a lot of street people in this local city. There are in a neighboring larger city. In summary, it looks like the local council is centering on the needs of the middle class. Low income/renters are seen through the lens of a mild sort of NIMBYism. Problem behaviors are viewed through a law enforcement lens. It’s very difficult to imagine this town embracing extensive low income housing developments. However, apartment construction is on the rise in any case, and the town is entering a demographic transition. The placing of public safety at the top of the wish list is telling.
I’m not active in local politics just now, but I’m consider getting more engaged with these matters as a sort of ICRT proof-of-concept exercise. Given that framing, I’d be interested with others might see as an integral approach to this set of issues.
