The United States saw an 18.1% increase in homelessness this year, a dramatic rise driven mostly by a lack of affordable housing as well as devastating natural disasters and a surge of migrants in several parts of the country, federal officials said Friday.
This is the “economy” that the Democrats ran on being a “good economy.”
Two straight years of massive increases in homelessness, but the increases started, shocker, in 2020.
This is from the AP News article that AP themselves references for the 12% increase in 2023:
https://apnews.com/article/homelessness-increase-rent-hud-covid-60bd88687e1aef1b02d25425798bd3b1
In other words, homelessness was exploding in 2020 and then was hidden for two years because of government assistance that got some people through some hard times. Obviously it wasn’t helping enough if homelessness was still growing during 2020-2022.
What policy decisions or laws enacted by the Biden administration do you think caused this?
Politically it doesn’t matter. You can’t win an election by telling people the economy is great when they’re struggling to afford groceries and people they care about are going homeless. Democrats sounded incredibly out of touch this cycle.
I want to point out that not everything that happens on the market is caused by policy decisions or laws.
There are also other factors, such as the cost of energy, total inflation, speculation, falling wages, etc…
None, I think those kind of effects take years to manifest and I think it was actually the Trump admin that undid a large amount of it (I mean remember who he put in charge of Housing?), but it didn’t start appearing when he was President due to Trump endlessly juicing the stock market and then during the Pandemic he begrudgingly agreed to assistance. Those things kind of hid how badly he was screwing the pooch.
But even then, I think that this is a six-decade long manifestation of what has been festering in the USA. Republicans tear things down and erode living standards and human rights, and while Democrats are busy trying to preserve or reverse those things which prevents them from working on making things better, Republicans are busy kicking the next thing down, and the cycle continues.
Yes, and another big reason Democrats fail to make things better is because they are too often working from fundamentally incorrect assumptions/towards untenable goals and therefore come up with wrong solutions that don’t work. (They’re often less wrong than Republicans’ assumptions/goals/solutions, but still wrong nevertheless.)
For example, even among Democrats (let alone Republicans) the prevailing notion is that we can somehow eat our cake and have it too when it comes to single-family housing in cities, due to a combination of NIMBY entitlement and oil/car industry corrupting influence. Because of that, they insist on keeping car-dependency baked into the zoning code and then delusionally try to paper over the inevitable spiraling costs with subsidized housing, instead of admitting that the physical geometric reality of space dictates that cities must be walkable in order to be affordable because cars simply don’t fucking fit!