Tories say 'rough sleeping is a lifestyle choice

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This post is golden!

I agree with it all.

That is a term used in Britain, though I am not sure if it is exclusive to British-English as opposed to say, American-English?

There are different types of homelessness. Rough sleeping is the most severe form, though technically, people who don't have a fixed address and who may be living in temporary accommodations are also classed as homeless by the UK government.

People are not supposed to afford a living when everything is too damn expensive and wages are low/and when there is a lack of affordable housing as you describe.

The poor can go eff themselves as far as the UK government is concerned, particularly when the Conservatives are in power, as they have been since 2010.

Yes - sleeping outdoors.

Basically have to be lucky enough to have family with a stable home to live in, or a high enough income to have bought at some point.. or very kind landlords who don't want to make you homeless for profit. Not a lot of other options these days.

And things are about to get hella hard. Many peoples' mortgage payments have gone up Dramatically over the last years year or so.. some people are paying $6k/month with only a couple hundred dollars of that paying down the principal and the rest interest. Some people I know have had their mortgage payments Double. My brothers went up by $800/mo on their condo due to a variable rate. I read that the average increase around here is like $1800 extra interest payments per month. If someone were to buy a house on my block and mortgage damn near the whole thing their mortgage payments would be $10k/month or so. It's all f*****g nuts and as people get squeezed harder and harder and the economy slows there are going to be a lot more people losing everything - which is mostly their downpayments when they lose their homes because their mortgage payments have mostly been interest only over the last few years.. but regardless of the amount of equity lost, ever more people are about to become homeless & their homes will be scooped up by investors/REITs and then rented back to the same class of people for more money than their payments were and they'll have to double up and share households with other renters or something.

Wealth disparity is about to get a whole lot wider than ever.. the rich will get richer and the poor will get f****d.

Isn't it interesting how more people seem to make this 'lifestyle choice' whenever the conservatives have power?

As seems to be have been the norm' for a long time now (literally decades).

Yep.

Depends. To some it actually is a choice by the actions take to end up on the streets.

The reality is, walk down any city centre and you'll quickly see why many don't have a roof over their head. Jobs can obviously be lost sometimes but I honestly don't see many people who live on the streets because of lost jobs. Substance abuse seems to be the biggest cause of homelessness, not so much job losses or the cost of housing.

Someone losing their job often end up receiving some form of charity from friends or family who typically invite them into their homes.....a raging smack head though? Well, not even friends or family want those people in their homes.

There's a lot more to the homeless problem than just giving them homes and plenty of reasons why people end up on the streets.

Why is it someone else's responsibility to spend their money on real estate projects that'll make a loss to house homeless people they don't know who'll probably trash the place?

My fear is I will get taxed out of my home. I wish taxes were fixed once you buy your home. That means they cannot raise them on you after you make your purchase.

Cool story.

Various studies have shown that it costs taxpayers more per homeless person than the cost of housing them. Property crimes, constant emergency room visits and hospital stays because they’re trying to get out of the elements for a bit etc = costs fewer tax dollars to just provide super basic housing.

Like it or not society pays for people. I’d rather pay less And have people healthier and happier for it than stubbornly refuse them housing and have it cost me more.

Depends on which type of homeless person. Someone who lost his/her job, almost certainly correct but an addict on the other hand, probably not.

I've actually dealt with housing a homeless person before (at the time I didn't know), he trashed my house. I've also dealt with vulnerable people who managed to get a house after being on a waiting list for months and then invited homeless crack friends they met during their time in a refuge........they trashed their houses while also stealing any money they could find within said houses, ending up in the original tenants being evicted.

You need to actually deal with homeless people on a one to one basis to know how far gone many of them are. Honestly, many people on WP just look at the homeless problem with naive optimism while disregarding the complexity and dangers of the "homeless problem". The homeless problem is frequently nothing to do with houses at all, just ask Fnord.

Then what do we do? What can be done?

To be clear, I'm speaking of the US experience, and yes, quite a few of ours do choose to live that way, particularly when it's made easy for them.

How many of them have you spoken with who’ve told you being homeless is an easy life and they choose it over stable housing?

My guess is Zero and also that if anyone said that to you they were being sarcastic or lying. Being homeless is a struggle, not an easy life of convenience nor luxury. Wtf

having been homeless i can tell you there's nothing easy about it. a person'd hafta be insane to voluntarily choose it. i did not voluntarily choose it, it was thrust upon me by external events outside of my control [reagan recession].

Strawman, I didn't say it was a life of convenience or luxury, or that anyone chose it over stable housing. What I've said is that many mentally ill and/or addicted homeless people are in effect there by choice because they won't go into shelters that demand certain standards of behavior from them, and can't or won't hold down a job because of the aforementioned mental illness or addiction. It's really, really obvious if you spend any time around concentrated homelessness that these are not people who got behind on their mortgages because property taxes went up, they're much more dysfunctional, but it's politically useful to pretend that they're all just down on their luck cases who just need cheap or free housing, or whatever the homeless industrial complex of non-profits is pushing that week.