-Laelth

I would not allow anyone to live there. Many are not fit for human habitation. If they haven't been ravaged by fire, they've been ravaged by the elements and scrappers (people who go into abandoned homes and tear out all the copper and wiring they can find).

However, I wish it were that easy to just give the homeless a vacant property. That said, many homeless already live in these properties, so....

than to pay for the social problems caused by homelessness.

But even if it weren't, human need should far outweigh craven bean counting over social programs in a country that pours billions into corporate welfare and warmongering.

personallly I think homelessness is a good way to teach these lazy bums to get a job. because no one with a job is ever homeless. *sarcasm*

I photograph abandoned buildings and some of the houses I venture into are barely standing... they count in that estimate given in the graphic. That's not to say there aren't some that could be repaired but then you'd have to get the owners' to actually give up ownership and a lot of times, the owners can't be tracked down. I know some cities are starting programs where they seize the property by condemning it after which they tear it down.

Measures of such data would have to be fine tuned a lot to combat the inevitable conservative backlash.

...I combined the little known FHA-312 housing rehab program with a loan limit of about $35K I think itwas back then. Then I'd use Community Development grant money to go shopping at the VA and FHA foreclosure listings and I'd buy the houses, townhomes, condos and zero-lot line units on the cheap, sometimes nothing. Most were in pretty bad shape. Copper gone. Whole HVAC units torn off the concrete pads. But the structures were sound.

I setup an application process where public housing tenants and the income eligible could receive homeownership training and credit counseling. This they had to finish whether they got picked or not. Only the serious applied. We paired up the house and applicants up based on the amount of 312 money they could qualify for. Working the process backwards from affordability first. They were all on 20 year mortgages. I sold the houses for $1 with a 5 to 10 year buy-back provision to keep the flippers out. I called it The Greenhouse Program.

They still run a version of it here in Nashville now. I'd chosen the applicants after creating a random number BASIC program on my office's old 286 IBM PC (this was 1987-88 so we had only one and everybody shared it) and assigned each application a number. When they matched that's the applicant who got the chance. Still no guarantee. That way I kept the politicians off my back who like to hand out gifts to their constituents and friends.

There's worse that could be done with them. Between this situation and the US wasting over 40% of of its food, we're a nation of plenty drowning in all the stuff we've accumulated, but greed demands scarcity to make this pinball machine run. So we end up looking like slackers and louts who don't know how to managed their affairs properly.

- And I suppose we don't.....

These kind of programs only really work for sound structures though. The point I was trying to make is that there may be enough homes for the homeless to have 6 each but that doesn't mean those homes in that number could ever be lived in again, so really, it's not an honest assessment of the waste in the US... or maybe it is.

going to return to this unless the people demand a change of course in our economic and tax systems.

I can't remember who said that, but it seems especially apt today.

you're welcome.

That is, we are a perpetually immature, babylike, world because of the short human lifespan.

We start out as babies and progress to immature children. Then, just as we start to learn lessons, and see patterns and gain maturity, we die and are replaced by a new crop of babies. And the process repeats itself.

So at any given point in time the planet is populated by a bunch of whiny immature infants and children aged 0 to 70 or 80 or thereabouts.

Obviously, there is also a collective repository of accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Otherwise we'd still be in the Stone Age. But we tend to ignore that repository because we're immature.

Thanks for posting.