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A perfect visualisation of a wasteful system (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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[–] 14 points 2 years ago* (20 children)

In what system would the homeless people sleep their nights in bed stores?

The scarcity isn't primarily the beds. The scarcity is where to put the beds, which is perhaps artificially upheld by zoning laws and other governmental shenanigans.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    That's just unfaithful interpretation of the argument, and you know it. US on average has 27 empty houses per a homeless person.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Are those houses like habitable right now? I agree that there is a mismatch but 1:27 ratio seems high to me.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    You might be confused because typically that figure refers to 'homes', not 'houses'. Apartments and other multi-family housing types are included in that figure.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Alright but still. There must be at least a million homeless Americans if not more. That would mean 27 million housing units sitting on the market now ready to go and not be sold or rented out? That dwarfs almost any city in the US, I can't even picture it. My building has three units for rent all occupied so you would have my building in a line of 9 million other ones I guess it takes about 1 seconds to walk across the front of my building, a line of 9 million would take 2,500 hours just to walk past, or a bit under a third of a year if you walked non-stop 24/7.

    This is very very large number.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    Vacant homes are any home that's not someone's primary residence when they calculate vacancies.

    That includes vacation homes, temporary housing for traveling workers or college students, houses that are sold or rented but haven't been moved into yet, housing held up in divorce or estate proceedings, etc.

    According to the census, last year there were 15 million vacant homes. Yes, that's a lot, and yes, many can't reasonably have a homeless person live there.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    It is absolutely a large number.

    Might also help to know that this number likely also includes AirBNB's and timeshare rentals. 27 million, spread over 3 million square miles (size of the US) and often in high-density buildings, including units that may appear to be occupied but are transiently used for only a third of the year.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    That's technically true, but really not important. Houses are defined as vacant if they're unoccupied on the day of a census. There's many reasons a house might be technically vacant, but not currently be able to house a homeless person.

    Was the house just sold, and is it unoccupied for a week or a month between owners? It's vacant. Did the owner just move into hospice or a memory care unit and their children haven't yet sold the house because they need to arrange an estate sale? It's vacant. Is the house under construction but is mostly built? It's vacant. Is it not safe to live in, but not officially condemned? It's vacant.

    Want to move to a city? Either you have to find the apartment of someone moving out, or you have to move into a vacant unit.

    Having a good number of vacant homes is a good thing, actually; having low numbers of vacancies in an area leads to housing becoming more expensive because you can't move into a unit that isn't vacant. Increasing housing supply relative to population leads to higher vacancy rates, but decreases housing costs.

    Housing-first approaches to homelessness seem to be good in practice. But those are typically done by either government-built housing or government- subsidized housing; it's mostly orthogonal to vacancy rates.

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  • [+] -7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Right so the problem is that they don't have money to buy those homes. It's still not a problem with the bed store

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    The problems are:

    • they don't have money to buy homes
    • they don't have money to buy beds
    • we accept their suffering as necessary so that someone can make money from selling those things
    • we accept that their life is worth nothing without the value of their labor
    • we abdicate our own responsibility and become complicit by refusing to acknowledge the lack of humanity in this system

    Interpreting everything through individuality is a choice. Just because you refuse to acknowledge systemic injustice does not mean it does not exist.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    The scarcity isn’t primarily the beds.

    Obviously not. The existence of homelessness isn't due to scarcity at all, it's to do with a system that tolerates (even necessitates) homelessness. The image could have just as easily been someone sleeping outside an apartment with a sign advertising available units; they sleep, freeze, and starve, because our economic model rejects their basic needs in favor of commodifying them.

    It's not that hard a concept to grasp, it just seems like people have ingrained the logic of the market in their brains and can't conceptualize the issue of poverty beyond 'stuff costs money'.

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  • [+] -10 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    Bed stores are a problem. They sit there taking up space for what? To look pretty for people to try out different brands of bed because we like to not figure out a universal solution to the problem of making a comfortable healthy platform of material that we can lay upon for long term rest. On top of that, instead of supplying our nation with affordable housing and furniture, it is laughably ignored.

    All these empty locations for these corporations to advertise products and "experiences"

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    To look pretty for people to try out different brands of bed because we like to not figure out a universal solution to the problem of making a comfortable healthy platform of material that we can lay upon for long term rest.

    We'll do that as soon as we invent the universal spine.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    yes health of your posture and spine is very important too

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I think his point is that any universal bed will be comfortable for some people and uncomfortable for others because people are different.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago*

    I said solution, not one bed to rule them all lol

    We need something that can scientifically determine a way to get people an affordable and comfortable bed that is not just go into a giant waste of space filled with random mattresses in hopes you find the right one and will likely just pick one that is "just good enough" after a minute or two from laying on it, When its use case is meant for laying on it for about 8 hours

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    IKEA and Costco both sell relatively affordable bedding and furniture solutions.

    Also, there are some delivery only bed companies. Ie Purple Mattress.

    Some people insist on actually trying out the mattress first and spending $4,000+ on a bed.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    The problem is that there are too many people.

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