• irmoz@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      Of course people would rather homeless people have housing instead of living in tent cities everywhere. But they also don’t have any desire to pay for it when it comes time to do something and of course make moral arguments against the homeless.

      These are two different groups of people

      The first, who are on board with state housing projects, are the common people who still have empathy for their fellow people

      The second, who are totally on board with homelessness because the housing projects are “too expensive”, belong to the political and economic elite

            • irmoz@reddthat.com
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              1 year ago

              Most people aren’t pieces of shit and don’t want people to be homeless, but then they’re unwilling to do anything to solve it because it requires money and effort.

              Dishonest framing. The average worker has nothing to do with this issue. They are not the people we’re asking to solve this. Like I already said, it’s the political and economic elite. Capitalists. The state. Where is the worker’s money supposed to be sent? On what is their effort to be put?

              We also have internalized that a lot of homeless people “did something wrong” to get there, which doesn’t help.

              Yep, neoliberal chuds, as I said

              You’re trying to oversimplify a complex cultural issue

              How? What variables have I abstracted into a black box, here? What few mechanisms have I reduced the issue to? To me, “people want affordable housing but don’t wanna pay for it” sounds extremely oversimplified.

              I have no idea why you’re picking an argument with someone who probably largely agrees with you.

              I’m not “picking an argument with you” lol. I’m just correcting what I see as a defeatist, “what can we even do” attitude.

              That’s not what cognitive dissonance means. It’s a question of willpower/desire to actually help. No one wants people to be homeless but they also aren’t willing to do anything about it. That’s not cognitive dissonance.

              Sounds like semantic fudging to me. “These people need homes! No, stop building homes, it’s too expensive!!” sounds like cognitive dissonance to me.

        • irmoz@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          That’s just a cop out. Of course it’s complex. No reason to just throw your hands in the air and say “it’s too hard, let’s just leave it to the market”. We already tried that. It led to this.

          Also, no one is saying, literally, “building more houses will fix homelessness alone, nothing else needed, DURRR”. That’s just a strawman.

          What we also need is a complete end to landlording. But this of course won’t happen under the current system, because capitalism fucking worships private property.

          • kittenbridgeasteroid@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            The entire post is about low income housing as a solution to people sleeping in tents. Building more apartments won’t stop people from living in tents.

            Pointing out that it’s a complex issue that isn’t solved by more houses is pretty much the opposite of a strawman

            • irmoz@reddthat.com
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              1 year ago

              No, that is not the point it’s making. It’s making the point that neoliberal chuds would prefer to see homeless people than affordable housing. It doesn’t say that building housing itself is the sole solution. Hell, it doesn’t say anything at all about building. We don’t see any construction in that picture, the blocks are just there. You could read it as saying that already built flats should just be given to people.

    • Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think it fails, but it does come from a specific cultural perspective.

      Those are “ugly Soviet buildings” built by the government. That already communicates cost and the unwillingness to bear it in the US.

      • MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Nonono, it’s unreasonable for taxes to go toward helping the poor. They live on the street and starve by their own choice. No one wants to pay for those wretched people!

        Where are the police when you need them to quickly usher the inconvenient truth of my selfish lifestyle out of my sight?

        • Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          You’re in lemmy.ml, a Marxist instance, reading a meme criticizing capitalism and saying that Soviet apartment buildings are a stretch?

          No, they’re the whole point of the meme. Paying for them is the point, who paid for the Soviet buildings? The message is that the Soviet Union built these and American capitalists allow people to live in tents on the street (while calling those buildings ugly). Housing projects would be a perfect “yeah but” except they are very low priority and not so common.

          Ugly Soviet buildings are themselves a meme. Up there with the hammer and sickle and the color beige when Americans visualize the Soviet Union.

    • kittenbridgeasteroid@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      It’s also forgetting that a significant portion of homeless people are homeless by choice, or are homeless for reasons that just providing housing won’t resolve.

      People have this idea that all homeless people are just regular people who experienced hard times, but that’s just a minority. Most homeless are mentally ill people who won’t take their meds or drug addicts who aren’t willing to quit.

      It sucks, and they shouldn’t have to live on the streets, but you can’t force people to change.

      • Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think people have that idea at all, if anything they are more likely to assume a homeless person is mentally ill and drug addicted than they are to think they are experiencing hard times or employed but unable to pay for housing.

        However housing first has been pretty successful, but goes against many people’s values for some reason. The big fear of someone getting something undeserved is strong.

        • Zink@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          Some might say the big fear of someone getting something undeserved is strong enough to prop up an entire political party.

          But it is not exclusive to them, of course. Some are just very bad about it.

            • kittenbridgeasteroid@discuss.tchncs.de
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              1 year ago

              You’re more than welcome to look up statistics. ~60% of the chronicly homeless have life long mental health issues, and ~80% have substance abuse issues.

              Pretty much every city/state has resources to help the homeless, but the homeless have to be willing to accept the help. Most shelters are drug free, so addicts don’t want to stay there and they won’t accept people whose mental illness makes them violent.

              You can’t force a person to take their medicine or stop doing drugs unless you want to start building more prisons.

              Again, I was never saying that all homelessness is a choice, but a lot of people choose not to accept the help that’s available.

              Source: My wife has her masters in the field and used to work with these populations as an addiction counselor, in Texas, so I know that resources exist at a state level even in a state that clearly hates it’s citizens.

          • irmoz@reddthat.com
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, liberals and conservatives only differ on whether gay people should be put to death, so you’re not really saying much. And being liberal does not, whatsoever, make you immune to conservative propaganda. We live in a capitalist society, founded on liberal values: whether conservatives know it or not, it is liberal values they are conserving.

            Also, as I’ve said about 5 times now, no one is saying that building houses alone will solve the issue. So stop beating that strawman.

      • darkdemize@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I believe you are arguing in good faith, so I’m hoping you can provide a source for your claim that the majority suffer from mental illness or drug addiction.