> The tough reality is that a lot of people on the street right now are happy enough living on the street.
Are they? Happy enough for what, exactly?
Are they? Happy enough for what, exactly?
"Happy enough" that housing that excludes queer people, men (or people who look like men), people who need to not have their names be public information because they're hiding from abusive prior partners/parents, pets, people who are currently addicted to drugs (and thus cannot realistically never have drugs around), or any of a host of other restrictions, will not be something they consider an option.
(Note that these restrictions are a) from separate sources, not all on the same thing, and b) things I've heard about in the context of shelters, rather than low-income housing; however, it would not surprise me in the least if similar restrictions were placed on various programs to help house the homeless.)
There are cases where the street is safer or has more autonomy, like you say. Solutions need to offer similar things, so privacy, the ability to indulge in some little pleasures, to come and go at your own schedule are basic table stakes.
A housing unit that lets you stay there indefinitely, for free, in an apartment that you can have to yourself—but doesn't allow alcohol, or is sex-segregated, or where you're mandated to come out and work for a specified period every day, or even that gets regularly searched for drug paraphernalia, is not going to work for a lot of people.
Basically, housing for people like this needs to have, if anything, fewer restrictions on its use than housing for the general public. Give them the space to fuck up and to heal at their own pace, and not have to worry that those very normal kinds of problems will leave them worse off than before (eg, because if you're kicked out, your stuff gets confiscated—or even just because with these projects in place, there's less of a community of homeless people to support each other for those who still don't "fit").
Even for the "long-term" housing programs you have a lot of rules you have to follow and can easily fall out if you commit a minor crime.
If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.
WTF are you even talking about.
There's a great Conversations with Tyler where he interviews a prominent homeless person in the DC era and one of the topics he brings up is specifically stratification amongst these groups:
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alexander-the-gr...
> If you realize that our human ancestors lived in hovels and tents for thousands and thousands of years, it's not too hard to believe that modern humans can adapt back to similar living conditions.
Humans build permanent houses pretty much the moment they could. The nomads were nomads because they had to.
Obviously crime is constantly a worry in a tent, but theft is rampant in shelters.
I mean, yes, shelters have issues and being away of them is often the reasonable choice. But, calling homeless in tents "middle class" is beyond absurd.
100% of the land was not owned by people with the ability to enforce it constantly then.