To be sure, are you asking if society does better when its people are homed vs. homeless? Because that seems like a question with an obviously-yes answer.
Society being better off in many ways (more productive society, happier society, less crime-ridden society) is an example of multiple positive externalities resulting from its people being homed vs. homeless.
Humans don't have a ton of preferences for the electricity they consume or the water they drink, just that it exists. It's a commodity, so a good task for government. Housing is not an undifferentiated commodity and is subject to extreme variances in preference. Markets do differentiation and preference matching infinitely better.
Hence why Government housing always takes the form of a utilitarian blight on the community with giant towers of tiny apartments with tiny windows...doesn't matter if its communist Russia or the richest capitalist city on earth (NYC), all government housing results in the same outcome.
Assuming someone will chime in with some "halo" government housing project in the nordics that represents like 0.01% of the government stock there but socialists will use as propaganda. However, it's important to remember these are not cherry picked examples, they are median examples:
[1] NYC government housing: https://www.brickunderground.com/sites/default/files/styles/...
[2] Russian government housing: https://i.redd.it/twz37r739xse1.jpeg
I've lived in military on-base housing. It can be just fine ... or sometimes not.
I am saying just like any other capitalist endeavour, where things that barely existed or were quite expensive many years ago eventually reached a point where both the price became so low and quality so good that it became a mindlesss thing eg sawblades. And housing for whatever reason has been an extremely anticapitalist market. Even if we take the exact same houses people want today, their execution seems far from optimized. Think of something like precutting all the timber and sheets at a factory and doing some light adjustment and fitting on site, developing new materials that are cheaper or easier to work with tools, etc there are countless angles of attack.
In optics for example, it was mostly this rather bespoke work by a few artisans and people back then might have said this needs a fine touch that can't be done on mass scale. And then Carl Zeiss emerged. I feel housing is in the pre Carl Zeiss era.
EDIT: Neither example looks bad to me. The russian looks denser but both look clean and well organized. It doesn't at all look like blight to me, any more than a grid of houses in a suburb does. It's clean and geometric just like rows of houses in suburbs. If you like one but have a problem with another, I think you are trying to get offended deliberately.
And who pays for that? The whole society: Either the government raises taxes, gets more in debt, or they print more money driving inflation up.
The most basic commodity, food, is a great example. The moment the government has ever step into controlling production of food, we’ve only seen subpar performance and starving people as a consequence. Ultimately killing millions (USRR, China, Korea…)
You might be surprised to hear how heavily government directed and subsidized food production is in the USA.
If the government just went on a building binge of housing to be sold at market rate, or even set an upper bound before qualifying to buy them at a middle class income, it’d work out fine. That’s basically how Singapore does it only they couple it with somewhat aggressive policies to encourage people to downsize their living situations once they’re empty nesting to free up family dwellings for people with families. We probably wouldn’t need to do that second part since we’re not a claustrophobic island, and could just count on natural turnover.
I'm curious to see how Austin will do in the near future by that same metric. More people can afford a place that will let them pay rent, although now at least some of those people will be living in someone else's basement or garage. These may not be very nice places to live, but they may be all some people can afford.
They've also removed the regulation requiring a second way out of a burning 5 story building. Austin faces an increasing number of red flag warnings and has the 5th highest wildfire risk in the US. It remains to be seen what removing that second exit route will cost in the charred corpses of families.
Austin is also cutting corners on permitting which is great news if that was all needless red tape that can be rushed or skipped without cost, but if new apartments built today are (or soon become) deathtraps due to lax code enforcement that could be a major problem down the road.
Austin has already lowered rents which is great, but hopefully it was also done right and it doesn't result in more people being forced into substandard housing or increased deaths. As long as it doesn't, other cities should look into trying some of the same things Austin has done.
When the options ar homelessness or subsidized housing, subsidized housing is absolutely the best option, which is backed up by decades of data.
Not quite. That's only true if you are housing people who ended up homeless due to bankruptcy or similar reasons (lost jobs, medical issues, etc). If you have people who are homeless due to sever addiction, you just end up with more OD deaths. You have similar issues with people with sever mental illness.
The homeless are not a monolith and different parts of the population need different solution unless you really really don't give a f*ck about them.
There's an alternative approach which mirrors the public healthcare concept of "public option". Instead of restricting government housing to means tested individuals or specific low income populations, you develop a public competitor to drive prices down and to eat costs in regions where housing is needed but the economics just don't make sense yet.
i.e. the US Postal Service model. It works extraordinarily well as long as you don't repeatedly capture and handicap the org/agency (like has been done to the USPS). And even with the USPS despite being severely handicapped it still provides immense value by driving prices down while maintaining the essential service of last mile delivery.
A similar approach could be envisioned for a public construction agency.
Also, the Postmaster General was on Capitol Hill today saying how this time next year the service won’t be able to afford delivering to all addresses in the US.
Agreed but even despite that they generally are a net positive.
> Also, the Postmaster General was on Capitol Hill today saying how this time next year the service won’t be able to afford delivering to all addresses in the US.
The same postmaster general who is a longstanding board member at FedEx.
And the US Post was still an extremely effective agency for well over 150 years, only truly beginning to become shackled when Nixon transformed it into the USPS in the 70s, and even then it retained most of its efficacy until the 2000s and 2010s when it truly began to fall onto its last legs.
But also despite being shackled the way it currently is, it's not exactly nontrivial to reform it provided there was any political momentum towards doing so. So it may get its legs back in the days following this administration.
