ReaZ

A lot of folks sympathise with homeless people in the abstract while also all but stating that homelessness serves an important social function that cannot and must not be disturbed, namely: terrifying the everloving shit out of us so we'll accept bad pay and bad working conditions. This is usually expressed as "if we give people housing nobody will have any incentive to work". And the older I get the more I believe that it's such a critical invariant to these people that any project that would truly end homelessness is immediately cancelled, blocked or subverted.

Sometimes I comfort myself by going on nextdoor and telling the people who complain about home value how interesting it is that they'd happily cause a relatively large amount of suffering and potentially death for a relatively small amount of money in their own pockets, and they don't like that at all

Our society strongly pushes the narrative that our society is just and fair. It's not a huge step from there to the idea that anybody getting poor treatment from society must deserve that treatment.

Nobody whose needs are being served by society has any reason to question this. Many people whose needs are being served by society have good reason not to. Because questioning society's fairness removes the foundation of their own sense of deserving what society has given them.

Also, critically, taking action to solve a problem is always more difficult than blaming the victims of it.

So we have a situation where people with power at every level are psychologically incentivized to see the homeless as a scourge, who interfere with their efforts to provide services to their legitimate constituents, rather than as legitimate constituents who their efforts have failed.

Profit motive moment.

To avoid being perceived as flippant I will also say that this is evil and bad, but it all comes back down to capital, there's no way to make homeless shelters profitable, so they are simply ignored and underfunded while homeless people are treated like vermin.

It's like how every other obvious solution gets ignored in the US' capitalism-first system. Traffic is bad? Invest in public transit.
People have staggering healthcare costs? Make healthcare free.

The list goes on

Most of the time we're not even told "no" directly on these things, we're gaslit to "investigate means tested healthcare solutions and create a roadmap to complete by 2035".

In terms of understanding why obvious solutions don't happen, it's important to analyze if the solution creates profit, and, if it doesn't, the bourgeois class would rather riots be in the streets than implement solutions that actually work.

I wish we didn't live in a hellworld where this gets treated as not our problem. I hate that we keep housing for people on vacation before everyone else gets a first housing.