I’ve always felt a mix of fear, compassion and guilt when it comes to homeless people. In the UK, both London and suburbia (where I’m from) have seen the issue visibly intensify over the last decade or two.
Here as anywhere, it’s a number issue. After discovering the YIMBY movement maybe half a decade ago, I began to realize, the next big social justice movement, has go to be whatever reframing of <this whole thing> -- housing and urban policy—is required to ensure society never again returns to this kind of supply shortage and general climate of stagnation and political innumeracy with regard to permitting. Even down to our journalism, the tables are stacked in an incredibly conservative, and just generally anti-progress, anti-growth, direction.
I think it fails to collect political traction because most people are just completely unable (and maybe emotionally incapable) of fully grokking and computing the scale, even, of each component of the problem, whether it be
people who struggle with aspects of living in a society, or
the resources (land, building supplies, “sky”, “views”, transit access, etc) that are each considered bottlenecks to “solving” the “problem”
The swathes of people who would benefit from partially supervised living conditions, either for their safety, health or broader social fulfilment. The number of people nihilistically satisfied to burn through their bodies on drugs like candles. The number of people trapped in relationships of convenience to save on housing costs. The number of people unable to move to an area more suitable to their career or lifestyle, especially the effect this has on artistic and intellectual scenes. Each of these “deaths by a thousand cuts” to the fabric of human happiness and productivity.
I was briefly excited by Keir Starmer’s seeming embrace of the YIMBY movement in this country, and might feel optimistic about the tide changing in the USA too. I lost interest in the tech career I’d previously been pursuing as I noticed that, a little weed and this and that was doing things to my creativity that allowed me to see the edges of “reframings”—the kind of Tone you would need in a film, or a song, or a tiktok even, that would reposition the average view on homelessness a bit towards “oh, THAT’S how big the problem is??”. I am semi-seriously writing a musical premeptively entitled “TENT” that might hope to at least be farcically fresh on these subjects, inspired by essentially defecting from the responsibilties of living with my mum and instead going out to Brighton to regularly meet and hear the various stories of people who’ve been through or orbitted this situation, which is a large cohort of my generation. I am also allowing myself to develop a rapper alter ego that may be able to tackle this in a way that is culturally and aesthetically appealing. I do constantly kinda hope someone has a better plan, tho.
I am unconvinced it will take much less than a wholesale reorientation of the current way we see planning as a state responsibility, and housing as a general commodity, to not just adequately sate the shortage but allow enough slack in the market for places devoid of life or industry to become lively again. But it’s an inherently partisan and charged subject and I’m wary the level of delusion that can creep into any viewpoint in such a complex domain.
Being forced by circumstance to make hyper-rational decisions all the time is the very kernel of poverty. A kind of poverty like this, financial or emotional or intellectual, may be the spiritual seed of creative genius, which will always expound how “creativity thrives in constraints”.
Do I care about people being more rational? Personally, about some things, sure. For example, I wish for a civilization that optimizes for cheap enough housing that I can be 90s-levels of un-optimal about how I spend the current chapter of my life. That’s from my (maybe unpopular here? dunno how the vibe has shifted in ~10 years) perspective as a nearterm X-risk-skeptic. I think using creativity to bridge the phenomenology and empathy gap between humans and plausible-robot-psychologies is a fertile ground for exploration when it comes to engaging with these questions in a serious way.
Likewise I might care for this in a much broader way so that the upcoming generations can still self-sort into the creative scenes of the coming near future and the technological as well as creative Renaissance, ideally borrowing from the prestige and vibe achieved by existing hubs, which also suffer from being exclusionary.
But then again, I don’t know other people’s lives, their priorities. This is the crux of why I can’t make art that crosses that phenomenological, moral gap, and indeed why I may agree with leftist dreams but am fundamentally a “so how do we actually build and multiply this rather than just redistribute it” perspective. Art may be best when it allows high-bandwidth dialogue between otherwise very different worlds. That’s why I look more to the new season of Rick and Morty than Broadway as it stands or traditional Hollywood, to see the operative system of culture mature.
I see revolutionary art at this point of cultural tension, to do a kind of “trading hostages”. A ritualistic mutual slaughter of sacred cows so that we may see the future without our desire for status stopping us from embracing imaginary positive sum improvements to the types of game we’re even playing as a people, as a politic, etc. I can see an AI achieving this because if you were unbound by Overton windows and Chesterton’s fences, you could truly see the common humanity and resolve with utilitarian beauty a lot of the suffering going on in the world. I ask myself what wacky, explosive voices could I chuck in a blender if I wanted to fast-forward the current rather tedious talking points echoing within the political zietgeist. I wonder if Sondheim did this with his last musical, but I’m sure it needs doing now and soon and it’s very much a Grey Tribe job.