build some damn housing…

‘In record numbers, people can’t find a place to live. But the homelessness industry is booming.

By the “homelessness industry” I mean the army of non-profits, consultants, data collectors, government bureaucrats, policy wonks, and academics whose stated goal is to “end homelessness” but who have utterly failed. And the more the homelessness industry fails, the more it succeeds. There’s big money to be made by failing to end homelessness.

But instead of the straightforward solution of building some damn housing, we’ve built this Rube Goldberg machine of market incentives, tax rebates, grants to non-profits, means testing, bonus density, ever-shifting definitions of “affordable housing” that time out after a couple of decades in any event, and a caring industry created to address the result and not the cause.

Focusing on the Rube Goldberg machinations of the homelessness industry instead of on just building some damn housing already is exactly the distracting rhetoric needed to prevent the government from spending the substantial amount of real money to honestly address the housing shortage.’