[filoleg]

I think they literally mean “they receive government assistance that allows them to have a roof over their head”. Where does the part about “choosing parents” even come from?

The comment you were replying to wasn’t making any sort of a judgement, what they said was straight up just factually describing the current situation. They weren’t blaming Andre for becoming homeless. They were using him as an illustration that just giving free housing isn’t some magic pill that will solve everything, and the effective solutions need to be more comprehensive than that.

[immibis]

"Choosing parents" is mocking a frequently-held attitude that when people do bad things, it's 100% of the time 100% their own fault and nobody else ever had anything to do with it. "Andre steals stuff because he makes bad choices. If he'd just stop making bad choices, he wouldn't be in trouble so much. It's all his fault."

The reality is that people often do make reasonably good decisions from the set of decisions available to them - and that set is often quite bad. Andre's only source of income is selling stolen goods. If he'd stop doing that, wouldn't it be worse for him because he'd have no income? People will say "he should just get a job" but have you tried getting a job? Like, ever? It's far from trivial, especially if you have a criminal record! So, given the choice between A (easy and effective) or B (difficult and probably ineffective) or C (having no money) the best decision is obvious. Choosing A is a good decision. And if we don't want Andre to choose A, we need to give him a better option.

Oftentimes it starts with growing up:

> Andre said he has struggled with homelessness on and off since he was 14. That’s when he started selling at 3rd and Pine. He’s been there almost everyday since. He’s 30 now.

If Andre had a computer at 14 he could be commenting on Hacker News today. Or with other factors he could be an athlete, an artist, an entrepreneur, idk, anything. But he got started on the "petty crime to pay bills" path and that constrained his options from then on.

When we combine this known fact - that his crime begins with not having a stable childhood, which is largely determined by who you have as a parent and how your society treats them - with the attitude that "everything you do is your fault" - we come to the conclusion that it must be Andre's fault that his parents were poor and homeless, which is absurd.

[MartinCron]

And in this case, the takeaway of “See? Exactly as I would have argued before I read this story, government intervention just doesn’t work!” feels so myopic. Plenty of interventions do work, you just don’t see them on 3rd Avenue.

[lliamander]

Which has nothing to do with what I actually wrote.