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Notes -
Housing and mental illness and drug addiction are all very complex, and I'm not super confident in this hypothesis. But I think there's a good case to be made that making housing cheaper will reduce homelessness significantly. There are a lot of people who are borderline unable to care for themselves, where in good circumstances they do well enough, but in bad circumstances they'll totally collapse. You can take a person, and if they have a roof over their head and their own toilet, they'll be able to hold down a job at McDonald's, or doing landscaping, or some other straight forward job. But take away that roof over their head, their life becomes harder enough that they're unable to hold down any job, and they spiral. They turn to drugs to get any semblance of happiness, or maybe because all the other homeless people who become their de facto social circle use drugs. And expensive housing turns them from transitory homeless to a blight on society.
I think Scott's post here makes a good case about cheaper housing being very good good even if it's not the main point of the post: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko
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