For those that have had enough of the Elon Musk worship online.
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I wonder if they use drugs to cope with the mental illness they got from being forced to live on the streets?
Naw, that's pseudoscience. We all know that it's proven that poverty is a character trait that you actively choose. Not rich? Obviously you don't want it hard enough. /s
pretty sure you can't end homelessness with $20b unless we're talking about absolute homelessness or something..
pretty sure you can’t end homelessness with $20b
The math is straightforward: Cost of a housing unit * number of unhoused people. Even assuming the extraordinarily inflated market rate for housing in 2024, $20B is more than enough to house 650k people.
Now, will the institutional actors that produced homelessness stop existing? Will we see an end to predatory lenders, robo-signed foreclosures, police harassment and civil asset forfeiture of the working poor, and unregulated real estate scammers targeting our most vulnerable neighbors? Probably not.
But we wouldn't have so many billionaires running about squandering our national wealth on vanity projects like Twitter without billions to be fleeced from the public to begin with.
$20B is more than enough to house 650k people
I got curious, so I whipped out my phone's calculator. $20B/650k = $30,800, give or take. I truly don't know if that's enough to break the cycle of homelessness, but if it is that seems like a pretty low number. We spend 40x that number on the defense budget, which is totally a jobs program but it seems like fighting homelessness would also ultimately be a jobs program.
Funny because elon is a drug addict who's showing he has some affective disorder because his daddy didn't love him and is a malignant narcissist.
Wait, I can't tell, is Elon talking about himself?
Completely ignoring that addiction is an illness.
Doesn't matter. We have the resources available to house, feed, educate, provide health care, and community for every American but don't out of greed. The US won't survive unless we mobilize every American to achieve their best self.
Homeless folks are generally no more violent than homed folks. Drug addiction and mental illness or not.
About a year ago a homeless woman had a miscarriage in my city and a couple local media outlets jumped on it, reporting that 'police had found a dead fetus in an encampment'. Ya know, after she called 911 because she had a miscarriage. Really helped solidify my belief that a lot of people would rather just stigmatize them than do anything else
I know someone with moderate substance abuse issues and diagnosed severe mental illness - basically as bad as it gets if left untreated. But she also lives independently and holds down a solid middle class desk job. How? She has rich parents who pay for treatment (individualized psychiatry) and care (housekeeping mostly), as well as an array of friends who help oversee her.
Homelessness is not necessary, even in the most desperate cases. It's just a question of what we're willing to pay and how much we're willing to care.
YES. Anyone reposting Kyle's daily eviscerations on Lemmy is fine by me. Kyle's consistency through my years of watching Secular Talk has always been admirable, especially in this age of soulless online grifters
Fuck Elon, but also there's absolutely zero chance you can solve homelessness with $20b unless you're just building tent cities with no other resources available there.
What til you find out about the number of unoccupied houses in the USA. Zero chance anybody is getting rich solving homelessness so we ain't doing it.
That assumtion is an annual cost. Although doing it for one year only would still probably reduce the homeless numbers considerably.
https://www.sciotoanalysis.com/news/2024/1/16/what-would-it-cost-to-end-homelessness-in-america
I mean...you could really build rather modest dormitories outside of cities for not much money. Throw free bus rides into and out of the city (where jobs and social resources are) at it, and you've got not a solution, but a pretty damn good bandage to help people and families get (back) on their feet.
Hell, rent them on a sliding scale if so inclined. But the scale has to be $0 up until a decent income, like at least the first quintile.
Somehow I actually yearn for the days of robber barons. At least they found socially productive ways to build monuments to their own vanity. If Musk wants to spend $20 billion to build social housing in cities across the US, I'm not going to complain if he slaps his name on the buildings. At least Carnegie built libraries.
It's because the modern day wealth disparity has no equivalent in human history, at least to my knowledge. Maybe slavery - but they were at least valuable enough to shelter and feed.
Elon Musk shows in this just how much worse he is than robber barons.
Where's the mental health care then? Oh, slashed to ribbons by the department of government "efficiency". Fancy that.