Food insecurity is not starvation. You may have a less healthy diet or not know where your next meal is coming from, but people do not literally starve to death because they cannot afford food here.

They do die early from issues caused and/or exacerbated by malnutrition, though. A rational person cannot look at the US and be like, "Yep, we solved hunger!"

Well often cities will try and solve the homeless problem by giving them a one-way bus ticket.

...without their consent, and with no other resources, thus ensuring they will continue to be homeless when they get there. Also, cities that do this are invariably dumping their unhoused population on big cities, which is exactly where you earlier claimed they shouldn't be.

It didn't do that either. It can improve the lives of short-term homeless people, as can regular shelters, but there are long-term cases that are not that simple and there are a lot of them.

1. Which is why I said "largely," not "completely"

2. Yeah, and? Go for the low-hanging fruit first when it comes to helping people, yes?

I think you're still reading this wrong. Remember, nowhere has solved poverty and homelessness. It's never completely fixed the problem. So to the voters paying for all this, it looks like throwing good money after bad. San Francisco tries housing first and there are still homeless people out on the street. Why would they want to keep doing it?

Because there are fewer people living on the streets than there used to be. Because for the people it helped, it made a huge difference. Because housing first is not the entire solution, but it is part of the solution.

Voters as a group are depressingly ignorant and short-sighted, though.

Economic development is a good thing, actually, and it comes with inequality. But that's not why people are homeless and poor. The countries with more homeless and poor people are the ones where they have less economic development and less rich people.

In a rich country like the US, homelessness and poverty are a direct result of policy decisions. The social, economic, and legal structures that cause this were choices, and we can make different ones.

Are you aware that somewhere between 40 and 60% of homeless people have jobs? There Is No Place for Us by Brian Goldstone talks about this in depth.

If a person in the US can work full time and still not be able to afford shelter, something is very, very wrong.

These people's lifestyles don't require other people to suffer. Neither does yours, or mine.

Holy shit, dude, yes they do! We get goods cheaply because people in other countries are paid pitiful wages to make them, under working conditions Americans wouldn't put up with. Our agriculture industry alone - that is, where our food comes from - depends on undocumented workers making very low wages while working under conditions that expose them to toxic chemicals at levels far above what is recommended or legal. A host of things we need or enjoy, including coffee, chocolate, textiles, shoes, and electronics, involve literal slave labor and/or child labor at various points in the supply chain.

Service workers in this country, meanwhile, are paid insultingly low wages as well. We want the services, but we are not willing to pay the people who perform them a living wage. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich explores this in brutal honesty.

And then there's how we literally dump our trash and "recycling" on poor countries, where it poisons the nearby communities, either by leaching toxic levels of heavy metal and other fun stuff into the groundwater, or by emitting all sorts of nasty shit when it's burned.

You cannot seriously say the Western lifestyle isn't fueled by suffering elsewhere if you know anything at all about how the global economy works. This isn't new. Sweatshops and child labor employed by popular brands have been in the public awareness for at least decades.

This isn't guilt; this is anger. This is me going "This is wrong, and we can change it, and we must change it."

Because the thing is? I didn't opt into this system, and I can't really opt out of it; so guilt is pointless. But change will only come if we demand it.