• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    I’ve said time and time again that “building more houses” is not the solution.

    I mean, it’s also been said that a lot of these empty houses are in rural/suburban neighborhoods outside of dying industrial centers. We’re effectively talking about “Ghost Towns”, with no social services and a deteriorating domestic infrastructure, that people are deliberately abandoning.

    And we’re stacking that up against the homeless encampments that appear in large, dense, urban environments where social services are (relatively) robust and utilities operate at full capacity around the clock.

    Picking people up from under the I-10 overpass and moving them to

    doesn’t address homelessness as a structural problem. It just shuttles people around the state aimlessly and hopes you can squirrel them away where your voters won’t see them anymore.

    At some point, you absolutely do need to build more apartment blocks and rail corridors and invest in local/state/federal public services again, such that you can gainfully employ (or at least comfortably retire) people with no future economic prospects. You can’t just take folks out to shacks in the boonies and say “Homelessness Resolved!”

      • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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        3 hours ago

        …But nobody wants to live there.

        You could give a bunch of homeless people housing, but there’s simply no structure around it. They have no money, and there’s no jobs. There’s no services around. They won’t be much better off than homeless in a big city tbh. Might be WORSE off.

        There needs to be available housing near the places where there’s actually things to do, jobs to hold, services to use.

        Worst part is, I bet a LOT of those ghots towns are suburban, not urban - so it makes it more difficult and expensive to build up a new community there. Everything is spaced out

        • incompetent@programming.dev
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          18 minutes ago

          Forgive my ignorance; I don’t know much about Siberia other than it is desolate and not much fun. How did that turn out?

      • village604@adultswim.fan
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        3 hours ago

        You need jobs near those places first. The locations are dying because of lack of industry.