this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Provide unlivable caging, you mean. Homeless people don't deserve to be "housed" in something like this any more than undocumented immigrants do. The reason homeless housing takes money and time is that it's supposed to be humane, and put people where they can interact with the resources of the community. Alligators aren't NIMBYs, and the administration ignored environmentalist organizations that protested on their behalf.
Yes and no. A huge chunk of ex-Soviet people still live in Khruschev-era serial housing.
That'd be buildings that have cracks, leaks and draughts all over them, you can hear your neighbors fucking, and there are no elevators.
Yet when those were being built, most of the population was living in barracks (not the military kind, but flimsy wooden boxes with no conveniences, crammed together, something like construction workers for the duration of one project) or in communal apartments (imperial-era normal or even luxury apartments split into rooms, rooms split with additional walls into smaller rooms, a family crammed into each such room, and only one bathroom and kitchen and toilet for all of them in one communal apartment) , and this show of humanity and a few others (like releasing thousands of political prisoners) form together the particular spirit of 60s and the Thaw in the USSR, where, paradoxically, Soviet people started feeling that there might really be some bright future ahead. Late 40s and 50s after the war were so dark that they are almost absent from popular memory. It's not a coincidence that Soviet science fiction (a thing that between 20s and 50s became almost dead) had a rebirth.
The housing program was one of the main reasons for this optimism.
So, my point is - I don't think homeless people would complain about getting bad housing over no housing. And I don't think that prison is that much worse than Khruschev-era houses, modern materials and all that.
I don't disagree with you, but I feel a communal housing with lots of homeless people in close proximity would be deleterious to homeless rehabilitation as the worst examples would negatively effect the best examples in the same way that prison turns a normal person into a broken person that can manage existing outside of that system.
You couldn't even separate the degrees of maladaptions and have productive rehabilitation because there would a point at which you create a oroboros class that would never be capable of rehabilitation in proximity to similar cases that would fester and grow until you need a larger capacity that never really makes progress.
The same sort of thing happens on the streets now. The influence of the worse cases drag down others until you have a common population of bad cases that are decivilized until rehabilitation is almost impossible.
A more separate and isolated rehabilitation program would allow for a greater ability for improvement in a vacuum devoid from the detrimental influence of worse or more of the same influence. Obviously that would be more costly and have greater logistical needs, but that is the cost of meaningful homeless rehabilitation.
Yeah, that's to an extent what happened with Soviet microdistricts (so many examples from Soviet practice, guess it was some good after all). Except in a bit different way, but I'll get to the part about creating a district populated with just homeless people not being a good idea.
There was a bright idea of, for some degree of coziness and comfort, building serial housing organized into similar (they all look like one more or less) sections, having same spaces with grocery stores, laundries, same green places with trees, same everything, and on a bit larger scale even schools in the same locations.
So - being a teenager or a young man in USSR you'd do well not to wander into your neighboring microdistrict after dark or even at day alone. Local hooligans would treat that as trespassing, rob you and possibly beat you up. That wouldn't be even considered something wrong, your own mistake.
They did achieve the set goal - in terms of green spaces and proximity of everything and nice feel those districts are fine, - but for the same reason of isolation and silence all areas developed this way had (and still have) problems with street crime.
As to your specific concern - I think that if we want to do serial state-provided housing, then it shouldn't be limited to homeless people.
Probably some kind of categorization of applicants should be done, a few apartments in each building should be allocated to homeless (not in the same section of it, but equally spread), a few for veterans, a few to be sold to redeem some of the cost, a few for students, and so on. The proportions can be decided upon. So that the general composition of each house's inhabitants were kinda average.
This would naturally be contrary to the interest of realtors and developers and landlords, so I'd expect such a program to require overcoming a lot.
Yeah, having a distribution of "classes" within a communal housing makes the most sense.
The issue of having a maladapted homeless person within proximity of "normal" people is that they may negatively affect others in meaningful ways. So an intermediary step from the streets to communal housing is necessary to act as a rehabilitation point to filter out the homeless that would actively harm the peace, safety, and security of everyone else. Without that intermediary step, the community will step up and "handle" the situation in a less than desirable manner. "So you are saying the guy that we have had various complaints about multiple times a month just decided to jump off the roof and nobody saw anything?" That sort of dynamic has played out throughout human history.
So a degree of isolation and counseling is necessary and the duration would be highly dependent on the individual's needs.
I agree. In between and also for some time after being given that social housing.
Absolutely, you can't just call them good and send them off into the population. A degree of continued support would be advisable even if they have transitioned into a "normal" state equal to the average person because homelessness has long-term psychological effects that can't be allowed to smoulder.