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A Life of Crime
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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I never understood this. How can anyone say with a straight face that the solution to homelessness is anything other than providing free housing?
House them AND guarantee they'll never get out of the system.
What if we commoditized the homeless as a profit center for government contractors?
But then we complained about how much this was costing the public sector, so we privatized the entire state bureaucracy and billed it out of the public coffers as "National Security"?
And then if you complained about the horrifying abuse of civil liberties, we labeled you an enemy of the state and threw you in jail as well?
I can't think of anything more AnCap than this.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic but an ancap would only agree with half of this. The difference is instead of the government oppressing you it'd be google or something
Peter Thiel is an AnCap, though.
There are plenty of people who believe you deserve to die for the crime of being poor.
I can: the solution to homelessness is a combination of mental health ed in schools, free & non-judgemental mental health support (incl. medication), free addiction recovery programs, free food, job & community support, and free housing.
If you just provide free housing, there will be a significant proportion of people who would not be able to fully benefit from it due to mental health issues, addictions, and lack of purpose in life.
Your speculation doesn't trump the massive real-world success and scientific evidence behind a housing-first approach.
You know the difference between a homeless person with mental health issues and a housed person with mental health issues? The latter has housing.
Housing is a good & necessary first step, but housing alone won't alleviate the issue entirely. I'm not sure that there's any disagreement between us.
I don't know why you worded that as if you disagree with him. He described housing-first. That's what the "first" implies - other things to support them as well as housing
Ok, I see your point. Mental health support, free housing, however, they come from the same place of wanting to actually reduce suffering. I fail to see how saying homeless people are criminals helps at all.
I think there is a selfish argument to be made for fully supporting the homeless. Giving them housing and mental health/addiction support reduces crime. It also allows many of them to work and contribute to the economy, which also means paying taxes
Housing is also much cheaper than jail or mental institutions where many homeless end up eventually, saving tax payers money
The altruistic argument is enough for me, but not for others. It's those people we need to convince, and a selfish argument would be far more effective on them. Show someone they can benefit from it, and few will disagree
The impossible ones to convince are the ones that benefit from high homeless populations, such as billionaires. Homeless make a nice distraction for them to scapegoat as the cause of societal issues
Many don't want it because of mental illness, what is more important is medical and mental help that won't put them in further debt.
Really it's the strings attached to "free" housing. Like loss of belongings, sobriety requirements, curfews, etc. Things that are hard to tolerate when you do not have resources.
Housing First is the most important. Can't really assist with any addiction if they don't have their own private living space.
because they view it as a moral failing instead of an outcome of a system
they view the world as mostly fair in large part because they've never really struggled or worked hard and had it amount to nothing despite there best efforts
they view homelessness as the end point of a series of bad decisions the person experiencing it has freely chosen this is why you commonly hear people say the majority of homeless people are drug addicts or antisocial people and choose to be homeless despite insert program name existing
in this world view giving a homeless person free housing is rewarding bad people who makes bad antisocial choices on purpose because they are bad
One problem with giving homeless people free homes is that everyone else will start to wonder why the hell we're working so hard for 90% of our income being taken by landlords or mortgage companies, when we could simply stop working so hard, become homeless, and get a free home. ⁉️
You're probably joking but there are plenty of countries that provide housing for the homeless where this doesn't happen. If you have your base necessities met then that just further incentivizes you to further develop yourself. People want to feel useful and they want to contribute.
(try telling American conservatives that)
Right, you could totally live in a hovel with 40 other people instead. And share a single bathroom between you. It's genius?!
Those people will be closer to getting it than they’ve ever been.
Perhaps one day their focus will turn to the owner class rather than the under class.
It's tough because many situations are different and reasons why someone is homeless. In this comic the guy says he got sick, so it's clear this situation a free housing solution would probably help.
In many situations there is a combined addiction and mental health issue that creates the problem. From my own experience with family, we had someone who needed help but refused it and it resulted in having them removed from the home.
People can become homeless like that and continue to refuse help and they go from friend to friend without making a change until they're friendless and homeless. The biggest issue is they don't want to accept the actual help they need but would rather just a hand out of money.
You got the order backwards. Homelessness creates drug addiction, not the other way around.
Well I have a middle class family member who had their life totally set out for them who then has abused drugs and alcohol and are in the slow process of losing everyone around them and being asked to leave their family home with wife and kids due to the abuse and defiance that they have any problems. They will find themselves homeless soon and still an addict.
I don't know if these circumstances are set one way or the other. It's always sad because help has been offered and given for a decade.
It absolutely happens both ways.
People don’t only get into drugs because they’re already homeless.
Yes. Except before homelessness, the wealthy consume drugs at far higher rates than poor people. A wealthy person has a drug habit and can just ride through it without losing housing. If you take a homeless drug addict and give them a billion dollars, they would just be another billionaire with a ketamine habit. This is why it's absurd and abusive to demand people get clean before you provide them housing.
I don't think that's always true. Some people develop a drug addiction and then that leads to homelessness. Spend increasing amounts of time and money on drugs instead of life needs, and then they're broke jobless and out of options.
Someone who's homeless may use drugs and develop an addiction, too. But the order of events isn't fixed. I don't know how common either order is.
Wealthy people use drugs at far higher rates than poor people. Drugs are expensive after all. The difference is that when you're poor, drug use makes you homeless.
Also, I sure as hell would want to be high 24/7 if I had to sleep on the sidewalk.
Precarious circumstances creates drug addictions.
Free housing only solves part of the problem. Homelessness is usually caused by something beyond high rent and addressing that underlying issue(s) is also necessary in the long term. Lack of mental healthcare is a common factor, as are substance abuse (often brought on due to mental health issues) or external debt.
To provide a comprehensive solution, a lot of things are required, such as:
The nice thing is that each of those by themselves already help. There's no need to wait for the perfect solution; solving this piecemeal is effective.
It's way easier and (initially) cheaper to criminalize it and strut around saying you fixed the issue than actually dealing with the circumstances that cause the problem and roll out solutions that'll only see result in the next election cycle.
They are slime like Gavin Newsom.