[krschultz]

As an owner of a vacation home and a large donor to homeless charities: this is completely divorced from the reality on the ground. It's a false dichotomy proposed as a way to block solving the problem of limited housing where it's acutely needed.

My ski house in Vermont does absolutely nothing for the homeless people in my neighborhood in New York. If you put someone in that ski house what would it do? Sure it would put a roof over their head, but there are no jobs, no soup kitchens, no homeless resources. They would need a car whereas in New York they can walk and use mass transit. The town in VT is already strapped supporting many in their community (I do charity there as well, and let me tell you it's more dire than much of the New York area).

The solution is to house them here in the New York area where they are (and in fact New York does a better than average job of this).

As for it being a misallocation, I own a $1M apartment in NYC and a $300K house in Vermont. If I just owned a $1.3M apartment in NYC my bills would be exactly the same, there would be 1 fewer "vacant house", and the homeless would still be unhoused. The real misallocation is how much I get paid as a software engineer relative to other professions of similar difficulty. I happen to spend my fun money on a ski house instead of a boat or a bunch of vacations, but there's no moral difference between a vacation home and other leisure spending. So really you are arguing that some people shouldn't have such a surplus when there are homeless people. Maybe that's true, but it's one of the most unpopular positions in American politics and if you are an ally of the homeless it's not a fruitful argument to make.

[kelseyfrog]

You seem to be focused on navigating the effects of the current system by relocating people. I'm not sure where you got this from.

I'm interested in modifying the system which allows for such outcomes, not managing the outcomes themselves. Please take a systems-level approach that seeks root-cause adjustment and not simply an amelioration of symptoms.

[rewq4321]

The root cause is primarily housing policy. Let developers build many apartments, and let them build small apartments. Zoning laws that make it a years-long process to just get a permit, or that force developers to build apartments with minimum square footage, or prevent large families living in a "small" apartment - these are all luxury laws forced upon poor people so that rich people can be more comfortable.

I count myself as progressive but am almost disgusted by how many progressives try to muddy the water here because they don't like to face the fact that they have to give something up to make their neighbourhood more accessible to those who are well-off people.

Anyone who doesn't take housing policy seriously on the issue of homelessness is either naive, or doesn't actually care about the issue and instead is trying to use it to push some other agenda.

[rewq4321]

*make their neighbourhood more accessible to those who are not well-off

[dgrin91]

You "system-level approach" is still missing OP's main point. If the system did not allow/encourage OP to buy his Vermont home, but instead 'successfully' managed to allocate it to a needing & worthy homeless person.... then what? As the old adage goes, it takes a village. This person still requires infrastructure to escape poverty/homelessness. You wont find that in a skitown in Vermont.

Where will this person find a job? Where will this person get help organizing their lives? How will this person transport themselves? Where will this person get help for any significant issues in their lives (e.g. substance abuse, mental disorder, etc)?

This is where your "system-level approach" breaks down - you can't bring the support infrastructure for this to a small Vermony ski town and also to all the other small towns in America. This is, as your first post says, poor resource allocation.

[kelseyfrog]

I'm not sure why respondents are focusing on a specific home after it has been materialized in Vermont other than it serves as a specific example that any solution must address.

Zoom out a bit and observe the broader systems which conspired to guide the invisible hand to allocate a largely unproductive property in Vermont to exist in the first place. I'll be very clear - I'm not advocating for unhoused people from New York to inhabit this property. If that's how you've decided to read it I implore you to go back and begin steel-manning instead.

[RhysU]

To be perfectly awful, 552K homeless out of 335M people is about 1.6% of the US population.

Even high-functioning and privileged individuals seldom have their shit together 98% of the time. I can't go 5 days without doing something chillingly stupid.

It is frankly astounding that we achieve better than 98% on any homelessness metric. A long forgotten ancestral memory says: there but for the grace of God go I.

Root cause: humans stink individually but we are robust in aggregate.

[RhysU]

I botched that division, off by a factor of 10.