America Poverty

 Yglesias takes on his favorite topic: housing affordability. What's interesting to me - rather than his 15th take on this topic - is the data about the American poor. 

The median American is richer than the median European, and I would assume that would be true for the average American, too. Some of this, he points out, is because Americans own more and bigger homes. This is part of his larger, ongoing argument that America should build more cheaper housing. "Housing projects" have a bad reputation, but he argues that they are superior to people squatting in public parks. A quick trip to the Tenderloin in San Francisco would argue in his favor.

Europe's poor are "richer" than America's poor, because Europeans are taxed at a higher rate to provide more benefits for the poor. America's rich are richer because they are taxed at a lower rate to provide more income for investment and business growth. That's a clear difference in political culture. (Obviously, America's poor are generally better off than the global poor.)

How does America change it's attitudes towards the poor in order to even slightly improve the outcomes? Housing projects or large scale shelters are clearly only a partial solution, and Yglesias seems to treat it as a magic bullet. "Getting rid" of the homeless improves livability in urban centers, and European cities follow this approach, too. And a lot of that is subtly racist, too, especially the treatment of refugees and Roma (gypsies). 

Striking some sort of middle ground between a "zero tolerance" policy towards panhandling and tent cities and the overly tolerant policies found in San Francisco could create a political merger between the middle and upper middle classes who want more livable cities and advocates for the homeless themselves.

The other part of this equation that never shows up in his article is the role of mental illness and substance abuse in homelessness and poverty. If you create "homeless people warehouses", you also need to create programs to help stop addiction. The genuinely mentally ill will need long term care. History is not kind to "asylums" but then again, living on the streets is hardly ideal either.

Back in the Progressive Era, the states were called the laboratories of democracy, because they were the ones experimenting with new ideas to arrest America's descent into oligarchy. It strikes me that there is a real opportunity for a mayor or governor to embrace a policy towards homelessness that could late be expanded to a nationwide policy. 

The status quo seems untenable.