Quebec City Mayor Bruno Marchand has suggested that the solution to the crisis may be a Finnish model, which is a ‘housing first’ approach that aims to give everyone a home.
Downvote the shit out of me, but explain how this works in the above case where one (let’s even expand it a bit and say) nation chooses to do this, and everyone homeless around the world with the means to make the journey, decides to head down there and enter the country by whatever means? We’re not talking about a taxpayer base, just a whole ton of people that want homes, and of course some small subset of those people that want free homes. People seems to scoff at the “it’s a complex problem” thing because they don’t think of the solution to homelessness within the confines of reality.
Im curious how you think they get to these nations, and you know theres immigration policy, you cant just move somewhere and take a house, you’ll get deported back
It’s almost like the only solution is to de commodify housing everywhere, globally, and provide everyone shelter because it’s a human right and so clearly works to fix many mental health problems.
It’s almost like C A P I T A L I S M does not inherently provide a good living standard to everyone, and allows the very wealthiest to pit us against each other in a rat race to the bottom. “Decommodification means someone will take your house!” No. It means you’ll always have a place to live and enough housing will be built to support the entire population. It means that billionaires will have to give up their extra homes.
Housing is a right, not an investment vehicle. The entire industry from building, selling, buying and renting needs a reset. Short term rentals need their own zoning type at a minimum, residential zoning should remain residential. There are some really papers out of McGill and university of Uppsala on financialization of housing and it’s effect on affordability. There is so much shit to do on this topic and everyone is stuck at bleeting “build more homes” on the internet.
You only got questions because your original post was inane. On a news item about a country providing homes to their homeless citizens, you asked how a country could do this without being flooded with migrants. You posed it as a gotcha, and demanded we come up with solutions to this problem that you, the most intelligent man in the room, found.
Finland had to close their borders recently due to a migrant influx, which they have since opened. Wonder where they’ll live, and who will pay for it, what services will the funding be redirected from, and what magical insta-build housing they’ll live in (it takes 18 months to build a 20+ unit complex after a quick Google).
My response was to Quebec city, expanded to “how could a nation even manage this from start to finish, nevermind a city”. I like this sarcastic attack on my person, though. This is precisely why I didn’t engage. If one says anything but “homelessness bad, housing good”, the internet megaminds come out and try to apply their critical thinking skills. I like your use of “we” here as well.
