One of the problems with providing free housing to people is that they are then free to destroy or abandon it. Consider that most homeless people have mental illnesses, often serious ones, and substance abuse problems. Sometimes the problem is just mismatch between housing prices and income—often it’s not. And even infinite funding will not always fix these problems.
The author of the meme isn’t a utilitarian, but I am. “A simple, cost-neutral way to reduce homelessness by 90%” is an obvious policy win, even if it’s not literally “ending homelessness”. How to help the 10% who are completely unhousable (due to their sanity or morality or behavior, etc) is a hard problem, but for goodness’ sake, we can at least fix the easier problem!
One of the problems with providing free housing to people is that they are then free to destroy or abandon it. Consider that most homeless people have mental illnesses, often serious ones, and substance abuse problems. Sometimes the problem is just mismatch between housing prices and income—often it’s not. And even infinite funding will not always fix these problems.
Housing first schemes seem to pay for themselves, though [1, 2].
My point is that those schemes don’t work for everyone—which is not to say they’re a bad idea, but they’re not going to end homelessness.
The author of the meme isn’t a utilitarian, but I am. “A simple, cost-neutral way to reduce homelessness by 90%” is an obvious policy win, even if it’s not literally “ending homelessness”. How to help the 10% who are completely unhousable (due to their sanity or morality or behavior, etc) is a hard problem, but for goodness’ sake, we can at least fix the easier problem!