Solving homelessness with homes. What a radical idea. There are 650,000 homeless people in the U.S. and 15 million vacant homes. We need to stop acting like homelessness is some unsolvable problem.

in unrelated news, some places in the Netherlands are dealing out twice as many fines for sleeping on the street as the previous year

Easy to solve. Compulsory sale order on all vacant properties.

“Finland is the happiest country in the world for the seventh year in a row GDP per capita. -Social Support. -Healthy life expectancy. -Freedom. -Generosity. -Freedom of corruption.” Mar 20, 2024

The currently vacant homes are not located where the currently homeless live, however, so this will require building a lot of new housing where it is needed - but yes, we could easily solve homelessness this way if we wanted to.

won't somebody think of the airbnbs

Finland is happy, but if you think the nail that sticks out gets hammered down in Japan, wait till you get to Finland. It is a very non Western, Western country.

I remember hearing about a program in Utah similar to this. Wish it was in all states.

There’s a vacant building in Jamaica (Queens, not the country) near the LIRR that’s been empty for *years* and yet has unhoused people living on the streets in front of it.

It's just plain cruelty. You can show numbers how these programs or UBI are actually good for the economy and they'll still bleet about bootstraps and personal responsibility from their yachts. Society creates these problems - it's the only ethical thing to do to fix it for the affected.

Yeah, but how is capitalism supposed to work without the threat of homelessness?