Wheelchairs parked at curbside tents. Disabled and aged are homeless on the streets. How is this possible in the United States of America? The legal framework causes homelessness.
More than 70% of urban residential land is zoned for single family residence. That is, houses, not apartments.
Obsolete regulations and bureaucratic inertia make new housing expensive to permit, construct, operate and maintain.
Up to 20% of housing sales go to investors. Much of that housing stock becomes short-term rentals like Airbnb, rather than homes. Rental stock shrinks, rents rise even for sub-standard shelter, and the poor cannot compete.
The global financialized economy sent manufacturing offshore to low wages and weak environmental controls. There’s no jobs to support a working-class rural population, as family farms are crushed by the system. Industrialized agriculture is not a significant labor market except for migrant workers.
Lacking effective public transportation, finding and keeping a job is almost impossible without a car.
The tax code, budget decisions and corporate lobbying increasingly transfer wealth and equity to a very small part of society. Tax code reform should look to the Eisenhower era for guidance.
Elected officials blame the vulnerable for being defeated in our culture of self-absorption and greed.
Such synergies squeeze people out to the street.
Many of the homeless are addicts. Addictions must be treated as a national public health challenge. The War on Drugs fails like alcohol prohibition in the past century, for the same reasons. The ATF and IRS should control drugs and tax them like alcohol and tobacco. Multiplied by savings as failed enforcement policies end, that would be a multi-billion dollar annual budget windfall. It could fund solutions.
Long-term homelessness solutions would include health care, drug rehab, funding public schools, community programs, job training, child care, and of course, new construction of affordable housing. These would be positive investments for the economy in general. But affordable is the keyword for housing. About 1/3 of Americans don’t have cash to cover a $400 emergency. Without industrial policy, infrastructure and tax reform, poverty will increase.
The homeless are a visible sign, a symptom of toxic systems. People are in general distress, living paycheck to paycheck, fearing one setback will make them homeless next. Throughout history, extreme wealth disparity trends into upheaval. The wealthy and powerful must invest urgently in evidence-based solutions for stability and progress. I do not appeal to their altruism. Absent altruism is why wheelchair-bound folk are living––and dying––on the streets.