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Please explain to me how expanding civilian gun ownership is going to significantly improve the issues OP is talking about. Are you proposing that we simply let people fire a gun at homeless people who start acting erratic on the subway? Does this state of affairs strike you as more safe for bystanders than the status quo is?
Similarly, “deregulating housing” doesn’t begin to engage with the question of what happens when insane homeless junkies move into an apartment complex, tear through the walls to strip the metal piping and the electrical wiring, and sell those things on the black market to buy more drugs — something which has occurred time and time again when serious efforts to provide homeless with housing have been enacted.
An expansion of liberalism means an ever-growing list of “human rights” for homeless to exploit — ever more legal hoops for police and social services to jump through in order to be able to take any serious action against a class of individuals who are inherently exploitative of those “rights”.
There's this point I've made before: given a constant source of dangerous people who commit loadsacrime which sometimes results in fatalities, and a lack of effective official countermeasures, the death rate is static regardless of how lethal each incident is (at least for a given ratio of deaths between perpetrator and victim; see below). This is because the dangerous people will keep committing crimes until killed by one of them going wrong, so raising the death rate per incident by a given ratio lowers the equilibrium number of these people in circulation and thus lowers the rate of incidents by the same ratio. So as a third-best solution (the first-best being removing the source of these people, in this case largely "meth", and the second-best being fixing your justice system so there are other ways of removing these people from circulation), you want to:
make the deaths hit the perpetrators as much as possible (in particular, make sure that the most lethal easily-constructed weapons are legal, because the dangerous people will probably have them anyway but law-abiding citizens won't if they're illegal), as this lowers the death rate via lowering the number of kills each dangerous person gets before dying;
jack up the death rate per incident as high as possible, because this won't affect the death rate per unit time but will lower the rate of incidents (and nonlethal crime still sucks).
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Cheaper housing does reduce homelessness, but it probably disproportionately gets the individuals who are least problematic off the streets.
The mechanism here is one that tends not to occur to functioning upper-middle class people; poor households are incentivized to get the number of contributing adults into a household which fit in it. The more dear housing is, the stronger the incentive. When you already have a roommate sleeping on the couch your cousin who’s down on his luck cannot just sleep their instead. But in areas with cheaper housing, it’s not worth it to let someone sleep on your couch. So your down on his luck cousin gets it instead.
Right, I have no problem in theory with policies that would make housing more plentiful and affordable. I just don’t think it would have any tangible effect on the “chronic homeless”, whose problems go far beyond a simple lack of funds.
I am focused on empirical evidence rather than theory. Houston, with no zoning and few impediments to building housing, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. Canada as a whole has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents. Vancouver appears to be something like 728 per 100k with 4,821 homeless and a population of 662k.
Why are you assuming that these things are causatively-related? It’s well-know that other states literally send their homeless people to more homeless-tolerant states like California, giving homeless individuals one-way Greyhound tickets to various destinations on the West Coast. I’m also betting that police in Houston are far less indulgent toward the homeless and the drug-addicted, and far more willing to use forceful means to deter and harass them, than Californian and Canadian police are. Houston also has far less effective public transit than large West Coast cities do, making them less favorable places for homeless people to live.
I want to be careful to make sure that you and I are both talking about the same thing when we use the word “homeless”. There are essentially two mostly-distinct populations both referred to by that term. There are individuals who are genuinely down on their luck, struggling financially and unable (for whatever reason) to rely on the assistance of others for long-term housing. These people often live in their cars or couch-surf, or they stay temporarily in homeless shelters. Obviously housing being cheaper will reduce the number of these individuals, and I’ve no doubt that the statistics you’re pointing to are related to that.
The homeless population I and the OP are talking about are an entirely distinct class of people. (Some of them started out in the first class and, through contact with the chronic homeless or as a way to self-medicate depression or trauma, got addicted to drugs, leading them to transition into the second class, but they’re nowhere near as common as the popular narrative makes them sound.) The “chronic homeless” — what I simply call “bums” — are not going to be able to access and maintain housing even if it’s substantially cheaper than it is currently. They suffer from some combination of severe mental illness, drug addiction, criminal background, and personality disorders. They end up on the streets even if homeless shelters are available, because they are unwilling or unable to comply with the rules shelters put in place. As I noted, if they are given a place to live of their own, they tend to irreparably damage said housing, due to intentional actions or simply profound neglect and disorder. I don’t know how different Houston’s number of bums is than California’s bums, but whatever difference there is is probably because of the policy differences I noted in my first paragraph, and not because of “zoning regulations”.
In DFW you have plenty of bums- generally less threatening bums but bums nonetheless- in Dallas county, but in tarrant county(Fort Worth) you have very few. The judges and prosecutors in tarrant county are all republicans; cops know this and make more arrests and are more willing to use force. In Dallas county judges are almost all democrats(and there are fewer bums in the areas under Republican circuits), and so bums are often ignored when they do minor crimes, because city of Dallas police know there’s no point.
The Republican Party runs campaigns on the difference in public safety between the two counties. They’re right next to each other.
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