Quote from: ribuck on January 25, 2011, 03:01:20 PM

Quote from: ElectricGoat on January 25, 2011, 02:47:46 PM

Homeless people don't starve or freeze to death unless they refuse help. I see no evidence that voluntary charity would achieve this.

Homeless people are often those who are made helpless by the state.

Homeless people are cash-poor but time-rich. There are types of homes that require a lot of time but very little money to build. Two examples are straw bale housing, and yurts.

Suppose a homeless person finds a farmer who will let them build such a dwelling on an unused piece of his land, perhaps in return for some help with milking the cows. Do you think the state will allow this?

The land has no "planning permission", and the building is too non-standard to be approved. So the homeless person is denied an honest way to lift themselves up, back into mainstream society.

In my country there are a few people who have managed to convince the bureaucracy to allow them to live in straw-bale houses or yurts. But the people who succeed in this interaction with the state are not the ones who are struggling and really need the permission.

As for voluntary charity, it's empirically shown that charity flourishes when the state is smaller, and that charity languishes when the state moves in on its turf. But even with a dominant state, private charity flourishes when there is an exchange.

What I mean by this is, for example, that the Salvation Army is always willing to help you, but in exchange you may need to listen to the word of God. Fair enough. If I was a destitute atheist I would respectfully do that, in order to lift myself out of poverty. Then, I would gratefully make a large donation back to the organization that had helped me, before severing all ties with it.

I have read about shacks being built on the sides of motorways in the UK and Ireland (there are usually a lot of trees where they do), and in Japan there are blue bag/box apartment buildings. Where homeless people have built their own two or three floor apartment building out of boxes and bags for waterproofing on public land (parks etc.)

http://www.share-international.org/archives/homelessness/hl-ticardboard.htm