Originally published at: Trump proposes concentration camps to solve homelessness | Boing Boing
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This was literally the premise of a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode in which the crew travel back in time to a dystopian 2024 where the homeless are herded into walled-off ghettos.
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He probably knows a guy…
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It would probably be less costly, and unquestionably more humane, to provide actual housing, adopting the “housing first” policy that some other countries, and even some communities in the United States have tried and found to be successful.
But the humane option, I understand, is not the one he’s interested in.
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Any city with TFG in it has a worse problem than homeless encampments.
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Rounding up unhoused people and putting them in “rehabilitation” centers to make our cities more “livable”? FFS
Literally proposing rounding the others up to increase lebensraum.
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Far away from any city.
Which would be quickly cut as entitlement for the undeserving, along with the food and sanitation maintenance budgets.
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This is all bonkers on so many levels - not the least being jurisdiction.
The sad thing is there are (likely) significant numbers of wealthier/older/house-secure people out there that are totally behind this concept.
These people don’t want to see homelessness - as perhaps it’s a subconscious reminder of their own failings to contribute to a meaningful/humane solution. And perhaps, just perhaps, there is a small twinge of guilt going on which is causing some upset.
Self-reflecting - I need to do more myself - so in a way events like this is a good wakeup.
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Weird I thought the typical conservative argument was “homelessness will go away when we improve the economy by deregulating everything!” Is this a tacit acknowledgement that won’t work?
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The costs of providing actual housing, when you look at them, are absolutely mind-boggling. The biggest effort to do this so far has been Los Angeles Measure HHH housing bond. The cost per unit for this housing has swollen to in the range of 600k to 800k+ per unit and it’s probably going to keep going up. Some basic math with favorable assumptions, LA has about 45,000 homeless, and let’s pick a middle figure of about 700k per unit, and let’s assume that maybe the homeless double up in these units. It’s still going to cost about $16 billion to handle this. This is significantly bigger than LA city’s entire annual budget. If we look at unfavorable assumptions, like maybe the cost swells to $1 mil per unit and the homeless don’t double up, we’re up to about $40 bil.
Add on ongoing operating costs (including services) plus the possibility of more homeless arriving (if I were homeless in Oklahoma and LA offered new free new housing I would try to move). There could be ongoing operating / maintenance costs in the low billions.
This is the best solution but there also needs to be a serious look at the math, not just hand waving and claims that we can do it by cutting the police budget to zero or something. I mean, yeah maybe we could afford to spend that much if there were a real commitment from Congress to fund it, backed by real willingness of taxpayers / voters to fund it while seeing other things cut. But the money does need to be seriously addressed.
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Conservatives don’t give a crap about solving the homeless problem; they just whine NIMBY phrases.
We’ve got a pretty significant homeless issue in our nearby city, and everyone with a house wants “someone” to deal with the homeless in a way that keeps them out of sight. Most are convinced that the homeless prefer to be unhoused and ill, so there’s ‘nothing that can be done’ except ship 'em out.
It’s maddening. :headdesk:
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That’s the cost to build the apartments, not to house people. people don’t have to be in brand-spanking new purpose-built developments. When I look to see if I can afford to live in a particular city, I don’t look at the cost to build myself a unit in an apartment building. And that is the ballooned cost after significant bureaucratic delays, which is a problem that should be prioritized over giving up on vulnerable people.
I’d hope also this would become a national policy and federally supported, once enough brave and sane states and cities act as “laboratories” for the idea, so they aren’t alone in contributing to real solutions.
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From a guy who in Feb. 2020 said that Guantanamo would be a fine place to quarantine returning Americans at the border, infected with Covid in other countries. Then his handlers shut him up, I guess.
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But it isn’t fascism, because you have the option of being treated equally as badly in prison. /s
Wait…
Oh fuck, that’s worse. Choose prison, at least then you have a fixed release date. I wouldn’t trust a Trumpist psychiatrist to prescribe aspirin to me.
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There will never be that kind of commitment from current congress.
The taxpayers/voters willingness to fund it should in fact be a moot point, if govt. decides to go ahead and spend the money.
The annual GDP of the USA is somewhere north of 25 Trillion dollars, which makes these figures absolute peanuts in the grand scheme.
Same shit here in the UK - we’re not as wealthy, but we are as reluctant to help those who need it.
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There is plenty of data out there showing that Housing First and similar programs are more cost effective for governments and local authorities to implement than even doing nothing.
Here’s a study by University College London, for example:
The issue is that, as with a lot of other, similar Keynesian spending programs, it’s a hard sell politically because people see others who are less fortunate than themselves getting “something for nothing” while they “struggle hard and get no support.”
COVID lockdowns in a number of cities showed that it is entirely feasible (and cost effective from a public health perspective) to house the homeless overnight. Choosing not do so now is a purely political stance.
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It’s mostly fear, or mostly fear is what I hear around here. People are afraid of homeless people because bad shit happens around them. They completely see themselves as the victims of homelessness and the homeless as the vector. People are just playing hot potato with the consequences of a lot of social and economic problems. I actually think having highly visible homeless population is an effective manipulative tool of conservative leadership as witnessing people living that way tends to inspire contempt and disgust which can then be projected into a whole host of social enemies.
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Precisely all of this. Thanks.
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Which of course you need to arm yourself against. More guns! /s
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