this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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It's funny how you can tell how able citizens are able to hold the governments of those countries accountable and how much they value life by the degree of a potential health hazard their hostile architecture is. It really doesn't indicate a failed government just having them, just one that has failing social nets for the homeless.
A failed social system is always the consequence of a lack of social policies, either due to ineptitude or disinterest, inherent to neo-liberalism, when percentages in the stock market are more important than the well-being of the population. This is where poor and homeless people are produced, instead of preventing them from reaching this condition. Having a fixed home is a vital and basic condition for social reintegration, since without an address it is impossible to get a job or to even have a bank account and with this it is also impossible to get a home. A vicious circle that you enter once you are on the street. But there are other possibilities as shown in Finland, how to reduce Homelesness and with an inversion initial, above saving money in social costs.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle-helsinkis-radical-solution-to-homelessness
Better as spikes in benches and under bridges.
Well, yeah, it's a failing social system, not necessarily a failed government. I don't disagree with you, but the reason that there's no housing available is because it isn't just the government, which in Finland is also a representative democracy, nor the economy, which in Finland is as capitalist as any euro.
It's due to things like societies, cultures, and banking systems that create and foster housing and property bubbles. It's due to things like the power dynamics between the socioeconomic disparity and the difference between the wealth of the governments entities in charge of these social systems versus the influence from business, private, and banking interests from the outside. Then there's the laws where actually trying to help can make you more liable if you don't provide enough aid or are held responsible for the condition of those you are helping, a fear particularly present to many people in the US and China alike.
Finland has a small socioeconomic gap between its extreme while being one of the richest per capita in the EU, but it also has much more control over who can become citizens, prioritizing wealthy neighbors over the rest of its migrants and trying to reduce it to keep it from saturating its social systems. Not every country can adopt the same solution without massive reforms and geographical shifts. It doesn't mean that spikes in benches and under bridges are the solution.
The whole western World have a Capitalist system, but there are differences in different countries, depending on whether the left or the right governs, which is directly expressed in social rights and social support.
European capitalism is not nearly the same as that of the United States, a country where homeless people are manufactured en masse due to the total lack of social investment and labor rights. This as a final result costs the state much more money than investments in social projects and laws.
It is clear that the construction of social housing is a large investment, but it is profitable as a result, apart from creating jobs and increasing people's general purchasing power, new income in public coffers by people who have managed to rebuild their lives. with a home, impossible when they were on the street, depending entirely on state aid without being able to contribute anything in exchange.
In Spain there are projects in this direction with the left gov, but not so much in the rest of Europe, mostly with governments on the right. The only thing missing for this is political will, nothing else.