The U.S. Does Not Have More Homeless People than Other Nations

Homelessness, like any other hardship, invites people to push an ideological agenda. Especially, homelessness in the U.S. invites people on the left to blame capitalism, or the American political culture, or a Republican incumbent administration.

One writer in the Huffington Post, for example, asks “How Well is American Capitalism Working?” and claims that:

If you ask the 15% of our population living in poverty, their answer is that they can’t find a decent job and they survive on food stamps, food kitchens, clothing handouts, and cheap housing or even homelessness.

And a letter writer to the New York Times asked:

As our own United States homeless population grows, the question arises whether the causes of homelessness can be explained by a transition to a harsher and crueler form of capitalism under the Bush-Reagan Administrations or, if not explicable by such a transition, is homelessness simply a necessary component to our present brand of capitalism?

This would imply that less “capitalistic” nations — socialist states in Europe, for example — should have lower rates of homelessness. Apparently, however, this is not so.

Cross National Data

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) compiles data on a large number of indicators across advanced industrial nations, and this includes data on homelessness.

The data do not show the U.S. having an especially large number of homeless.

For example, they show that 0.18% of the U.S. population to be homeless, as opposed to 0.25% of the population of the United Kingdom, 0.42% of the German population and 0.42% of the French population.

In the supposed socialist utopia of Sweden, 0.36% of the population is homeless, according to this tabulation.

How Do We Define Homelessness

Of course, any cross-national data must be questioned for comparability, and that is the case here.

The most basic definition of homelessness is:

Homelessness counts in most countries include rough sleepers, people living in accommodation for the homeless and in emergency temporary accommodation. . . .

This is fair enough. While “sleeping rough” (on a park bench, heating grate or in a subway) most certainly corresponds to our notion of homelessness, sleeping in a shelter where you are usually required to leave every morning does too.

But some nations define “homelessness” much more broadly. Sometimes, it includes the following:

• People living in institutions: Including people who stay longer than needed in health institutions due to lack of housing; and people in penal institutions with no housing available prior to release
• People living in non-conventional dwellings due to lack of housing : where accommodation consists of mobile homes, non-conventional building or temporary structure, and is used due to a lack of housing and is not the person’s usual place of residence
• People living temporarily in conventional housing with family and friends due to lack of housing

Some of this is pretty ridiculous. If you stay in prison for a few extra days, you are not homeless, notwithstanding that you would rather be out. Living is a trailer is not being homeless either, even if you do get stereotyped as white trash.

And if you have been evicted and are sleeping on the couch at your sister and brother-in-law’s place, you are not homeless, no matter how much you would like your own pad.

More Comparisons

The OECD document includes a comprehensive list of the definitions of “homelessness” used in each nation, and allows us to make some rough comparisons.

And also note some senseless definitions. In Australia, for example, the “homeless” include:

People living in boarding houses (due to lack of suitable accommodation alternatives); people living in severely crowded dwellings.

Perhaps this broad definition is part of the reason Australia has 2.6 times the reported homeless population of the U.S. But it would be hard to argue that Australia has fewer homeless, even taking the different definitions into account.

Much the same analysis would apply to Sweden, which defines “homelessness” more broadly than the U.S, but reports twice as many people as being homeless. And also to Germany, with a broad definition of “homelessness,” but an estimate of 2.3 times as many homeless as the U.S.

But France, for example, defines “homelessness” pretty much the same way the U.S. does, but reports 22% more homeless people.

The United Kingdom

The definition “homelessness” in the U.K. is wordy, and apparently quite narrow.

Number of households who after applying for housing assistance are accepted by local authorities as being “Statutory homeless” (i.e. those who are unintentionally homeless and fall into a ‘priority need’ category. Somebody is statutorily homeless if they do not have accommodation that they have a legal right to occupy, which is accessible and physically available to them (and their household) and which it would be reasonable for them to continue to live in. It would not be reasonable for someone to continue to live in their home, for example, if that was likely to lead to violence against them (or a member of their family).

It seems unlikely that all (or perhaps even most) people who really are homeless would be among the “Statutory homeless.” Indeed a private organization estimated that in 2017 307,000 people were sleeping rough or in inadequate housing in the U.K. This compares to 57,750 households in the OECD data (but for England alone).

No matter what adjustments are made, the U.K. has at least as many — and probably more — homeless as does the U.S.

Conclusion

The homeless are not victims of capitalism. They are not even victims of structural changes in the economy. They are victims of their own bad behavior, including untreated clinical depression, substance abuse and involvement in criminal activity.

That does not mean they should not be helped, but it does mean they should not be enabled by liberal public policies. Simply providing “affordable housing” is just an enabler — at least, unless there is a set of fairly rigorous conditions attached. Allowing homeless encampments to despoil public streets and green space is another enabler.

Indeed, to help them a fair amount of coercion might be necessary, which would be justified for a population which, left to its own devices, lives a wretched existence.

The Fruits of European Socialism: Homelessness in France

From Reuters:

When the first of 16 families entered a vacant four-storey office block in Paris one night last December, they placed repeated food orders so the neighbors could see from the comings-and-goings of delivery men that the address was occupied. Under French law, witness accounts of residency make eviction harder.

But it was their next act that really had the building’s owner shaking his head in disbelief.

“What amazed me was when they invited in the housing minister a few days later,” said Spanish property developer Ignacio Lasa Georgas, who has temporarily lost control of his 7- million-euro ($9 million) office block between the Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est railway stations.

“And over she came to give them her support.”

The squat at Number 2 rue de Valenciennes is both a political battleground and a symbol of France’s dysfunctional housing market. Activists helped the families move in to draw attention to how Europe’s second biggest economy, which prides itself on its welfare system, is struggling to provide basic shelter for many of its 65 million citizens. The problem is not unique to France, but the reasons for it are both aggravated by, and feed into, the country’s wider economic woes.

The housing shortage is further fueled by long-standing policies to protect tenants that discourage many owners from putting properties up for rent. Housing experts say as many as 7 percent of all apartments in Paris are vacant.

Protecting people from the evil, rapacious landlords is a notion to warm the hearts of every leftist and socialist. But that has consequences.

The red tape that clogs up bids for planning permission, as well as a steadily growing list of regulations on everything from safety to parking spaces, has also discouraged new building. Strict rules on building figure prominently in the total 400,000 regulations in France’s law books. In Le Mans, a city famed for its motor races, plans for a new school have hit trouble because authorities are insisting it be earthquake-proofed — despite a government report stating there has never been any evidence of seismic activity in the region.

Again, the idea is to protect people. But politicians and bureaucrats can always find the need to “protect” people from dangers that aren’t significant, or if they are significant, the protection turns out to be vastly worse than the hazard.

The shortage is plain on the streets of the capital. An early morning walk reveals huddles of cardboard and blankets in doorways, the makeshift abodes of some of the 33,000 people estimated by housing charity Abbe Pierre Foundation to be living rough in France — a figure that rises to 274,000 including those in shelters, short-term bedsits and improvised homes on campsites or the like.

That is nearly half the 633,782 people officially recorded as homeless on a single night last year in the United States, a country whose population is almost five times that of France. Exact comparisons are difficult because the countries use different methods, but both measures include people who are living rough or in temporary shelters.

Add to the homeless those living in acute overcrowding or moving from sofa to sofa, and Abbe Pierre, the charity, estimates a total of 3.6 million people in the country lack decent housing. The group puts the shortfall of affordable housing at more than 800,000.

Doesn’t sound like the stereotype of European socialism found among liberal U.S. journalists, or leftist American professors.

Under French law, squatting is a civil offence and evictions not simple. In France, no one can be evicted in winter. Data on squatting is hard to find, but the latest estimates suggest it has risen sharply in Paris — helped by increasingly organized activists — to around 20,000 squatters from about 3,000 in 2002, said Hans Pruijt of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, who has studied the practice across Europe.

Lasa Georgas, owner of the rue de Valenciennes building, has launched legal action to regain control of his building. Its last tenant — jewellery shop “Histoire d’Or” — moved to a more upmarket site before its lease ran out in March 2012. Lasa Georgas says he had new takers lined up including a private college, and an investor who wanted to buy the building to convert into a hotel. They even made a formal offer, but both projects are now on ice while he sorts out the squatters. Given the local government has intervened to support the families, that may take some time.

Despite his legal claim, Lasa Georgas is unsure when he will have access to the place, if ever. Hollande’s Socialist allies at Paris City Hall announced in April they would make an offer on the building, with a view to buying it to convert into social housing.

In France, local authorities have a pre-emption right to bid for buildings for the wider public good. This does not mean they can force a sale, but it obliges owners to either enter negotiations or challenge them in court, which can take years.

Jean-Yves Mano, the Paris deputy mayor in charge of housing, said City Hall made a “symbolic” gesture to buy the building. He declined to say how much it had offered, but called the price a “significant mark-down” on the market value which a government agency had put at 7 million euros.

He says City Hall uses its pre-emption right on up to 30 buildings a year and has no qualms about bidding low. “After all, we are responsible for looking after the money of the people of Paris,” he told Reuters at his office.

Lasa Georgas said the city’s offer was 4.3 million euros, which he rejected. He is angry. “I invested in France back in 2005 because at that point Spanish property prices were already sky-high and I thought French law would give me protection. But the authorities seem to have a clear aim of taking away my building.” A hearing on the case in early May was postponed on procedural grounds.

So leftists in France (and even right-of-center governments have to make concessions to a socialist culture in Europe) fail to protect an owner’s property rights. They allow squatters to occupy his property, and then threaten to de facto confiscate it at far less than fair market value. Redress in the courts is questionable.

The consequence of these sort of policies is obvious: people don’t invest when their investments are not secure.

So France has a much larger per capita population of homeless people than the U.S.

A naïve view would say that this is idealism gone wrong. But socialism has never been based on idealism. It has been based on the selfishness and envy of the poor and working class people in Europe, and the lust for power of the leftist elites: the political activists, union officials, college professors, intellectuals, journalists and government bureaucrats.

And under Obama, the U.S. is moving in the same direction.

The Perverted Culture of the European Welfare State

From the Associated Press:

MARSEILLE, France (AP) — Battling for benefits is a tradition in the Gilly family, passed from generation to generation — as it is for families across the country. And that goes some way toward explaining why the protests against plans to raise France’s retirement age have shown such determination and ferocity.

For Gilly and many other Frenchmen and women, social benefits such as long vacations, state-subsidized health care and early retirement are more than just luxuries: They’re seen as a birthright — an essential part of the identity of today’s France.

The protest against a government plan to raise the retirement age to 62 has special meaning for five members of the Eric Gilly clan who are demonstrating in the streets of Marseille.

“We want to stop working at 60 because it’s something our parents, our grandparents and even our great-grandparents fought for,” says Gilly, 50, a union representative at Saint-Pierre Cemetery, the largest in this bustling Mediterranean port city.

“And over the years ... you can see that we’re losing everything they fought for. And that’s unacceptable.”

In Marseille, strikes to protest President Nicolas Sarkozy’s planned retirement reform have shut down docks, left tons of garbage putrefying on sidewalks and drawn tens of thousands into the streets for each of six protest marches since early September.

Gilly, with huge drums strapped over his shoulders, led the parade for the Workers’ Force union Monday. His sister, two daughters and a nephew weren’t far behind.

“Unionism, it’s in the skin,” Gilly said in an interview with Associated Press Television News. “It’s more than a passion. When something is wrong or things aren’t right, they have to be changed.”

Retirement benefits are coveted, by some, perhaps even more than a higher salary, making the issue particularly sensitive. Sarkozy’s plan to raise the retirement age hits a nerve deep in the French psyche.

Just savor, for a minute, how absurd this is. The French are proud of not working.

They demand more and more benefits. But of course, they have to pay for those benefits.

The origin of the European welfare state was socialist politicians appealing to the working class, telling them (in effect) “vote us into power, and we will take money from the rich and give it to you.” The whole edifice, in other words, was built on the selfishness of socialist politicians and low income workers.

But of course, soon enough the bill has to be paid by ordinary workers. But the old notion that you can just make demands on government and get goodies for free persists.

The fundamental problem is that the culture of Europe is not rooted in capitalism, but in feudalism — as political scientist Louis Hartz famously insisted.

For peasants, bettering yourself by working harder just wasn’t possible. You only became better off by being given something — by the Lord of the Manor, or by the King, or by the parliament. It’s a culture of dependency, not of work, responsibility and achievement. It’s a backward culture, and part of the greatness of America is that we have resisted it.

Nice Change

New York Times Bias In French Election

Anybody reading the New York Times coverage of the recent French election would have had no problem knowing which candidate that paper favored. From the Media Research Center:

Paris-based New York Times reporter Elaine Sciolino continued to nurse her long-standing grudge against Nicolas Sarkozy, the tough-on-crime presidential candidate of France, in two stories, one before and one after Sarkozy routed Socialist candidate Segolene Royal to win the presidency. Before the vote, she fretted that “while Ms. Royal has pledged to protect and unite France, Mr. Sarkozy has often taken a ruthless us-against-them attitude” and complained: “In this election, authority apparently is deemed to be more important than compassion.” After the election, she declared that “the election was a triumph of raw ambition, efficiency and political sleight-of-hand.”

Sciolino wrote in Saturday’s “France to Vote After Presidential Race’s Scorching Finale”:

He has gambled -- apparently successfully -- during the campaign that by turning hard right he would win over supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the head of the extreme right National Front who made it into the second round of the 2002 election but made it into only fourth place this time.

While Ms. Royal has pledged to protect and unite France, Mr. Sarkozy has often taken a ruthless us-against-them attitude, stressing there is no place in France for young people who do not respect the law or for immigrants who do not embrace French values.

In Montpellier on Thursday, where he made his last campaign speech, Mr. Sarkozy railed against those who do not like him. ‘People accuse me of encouraging public anger,’ he said. ‘But who’s angry? The thugs? The drug traffickers? I can assure you -- I do not seek to be the friend of thugs.’

In this election, authority apparently is deemed to be more important than compassion.

Sarkozy’s win was Monday’s lead story, and Sciolino remained hostile:

Ms. Royal had repeatedly appealed to the women of France to vote for her in a show of female solidarity. But Mr. Sarkozy, a conservative who made his reputation as a hard-line minister of the interior, got the majority of the women’s vote, according to Ipsos, an international polling company....

He also struck a conciliatory note, reaching out to the huge swath of French people who seem to fear him, especially in the country’s ethnically and racially mixed suburbs, where he is accused of fueling tensions with his provocative language and an aggressive police presence....

With his raw, often divisive rhetoric, Mr. Sarkozy will have to change course to neutralize deep-rooted hostility against him, particularly in the tough ethnic suburbs.

About 2,000 people gathered at Place de la Bastille in central Paris to await the election results, with some burning an effigy of Mr. Sarkozy before tearing it apart.

But within two hours of the polls closing, the scene had degenerated into violent clashes between the police and several hundred people in the crowd who smashed windows and set one vehicle on fire....

The election was a triumph of raw ambition, efficiency and political sleight-of-hand.

It doesn’t occur to the Times that there might be something wrong with people who, when they face losing a democratic election, turn to violence.

In their leftist world, it is Sarkozy’s responsibility to placate the thugs.

After all, the violence is from the left, so it is righteous!

It must be galling to the American left, so used to invoking the hostility of the supposedly so civilized French against George Bush, to have a generally pro-Bush and pro-American candidate win.

It was, of course, a bad argument to make in the first place. There is nothing about the nation of France that gives it any particular moral authority.

But it was an important argument to the effete liberals, and now it has been ripped away from them.

France: Economy Mired in a Statist Morass

You know that a free market economic philosophy has become dominant when even a Mainstream Media organization like the Associated Press blames the economic woes of a nation on government control.

But that’s what the wire service did in a report on France.

PARIS - Clusters of migrant workers mount the train’s crowded carriages, leaving their families and filing across the border to work at jobs more plentiful and lucrative than at home.

These hungry young men and women are not from lands riven by war or financial ruin, but from France — one of the world’s richest countries, and straining to stay that way.

Their knapsacks bear laptops or bottles of champagne, and their transport of choice is the Eurostar train, zipping them beneath the English Channel to London, a city radiating growth and opportunity.

The French workers are leaving an economy that is treading water while those of developing nations, and other wealthy ones, speed ahead. They’re fleeing a land once seen as a symbol of superior quality but that now even the French are convinced is in decline.

Half of French households live on less than $1,990 in income per month. Unemployment hasn’t fallen below 8 percent since 1984. Public debt has quintupled since 1980 to fund a welfare state that more people depend on for survival. Imports are spiking and fueling a ballooning trade deficit. France was among the top 10 richest countries per capita a generation ago — today’s it’s slipped to 17th place.

France is now on the cusp of change, choosing a new president who will be expected to yank the state-dependent economy out of its doldrums — but probably won’t. None of the candidates to replace conservative Jacques Chirac in the first round of elections April 22 appears to be a French Margaret Thatcher who would force profound and painful reform.

Fresh ideas

Some of the freshest economic ideas are coming from Francois Bayrou, a champion of the average guy riding on disillusionment with the left-right paradigm. Bayrou, polling in third place, would allow businesses to hire two employees free of payroll taxes and social charges for the first five years — a shocking proposition here. But he would govern by consensus, a formula certain to bury bold reform.

Across the spectrum, jobs are question No. 1 for French voters mulling their presidential choices.

“I’d like to live in France. But I don’t want to work there,” said Nicolas Boutry, whose family lives on the French Riviera but who works for a London bank.

“In France you either search eternally for a job, or you stay eternally in a job,” he said.

Strict French labor laws are dubbed “worker-friendly,” yet millions can’t find work. Industries decamp to countries like China where hiring is cheaper and easier. Job seekers leave for countries like Britain with more job openings.

It would take major upheaval in France’s labor markets to draw people like Boutry home. A dramatic solution, too, is needed for the chronically unemployed and for the minorities in French housing projects, where riots broke out in 2005 and up to half of young people are unemployed.

A generation ago, debt-laden, strike-suffering Britain looked enviously at France, which boasted lavish worker protections and paid its state-run businesses to innovate.

History, however, favored free markets. Thatcher’s unpopular economic reforms in the 1980s left Britain better placed to benefit from fast-changing labor markets and accelerated capital movements.

“We should not be afraid today to be inspired by what works. The British model managed to create a society of full employment, peaceful and confident in the future,” wrote Pascal Boris of France’s BNP Paribas bank, who heads a group of French executives in Britain.

On Trial in Paris For Cartoons of Muhammad

Via Althouse, an article in the New York Times:

PARIS, Feb. 7 — Hearings began Wednesday in a suit brought by two influential French Muslim organizations against a satirical weekly newspaper for printing cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that had touched off international rioting.

The Paris Mosque and the Union of Islamic Organizations of France contend that the newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, and its director, Philippe Val, are guilty of slander, an offense that carries a possible six-month sentence and a fine of up to 22,500 euros, or about $29,000.

“If we can no longer laugh at the terrorists, what weapon is left for the citizen?” Mr. Val said at the hearing, according to The Associated Press.

“These drawings are about ideas, not men, about ideas defended by men who commit violent acts.”

The case is causing debate in a country where separation of church and state is considered a fundamental tenet of the national identity.

In its Feb. 8, 2006, issue, Charlie Hebdo republished 12 drawings that had originally appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, some of them representing the Prophet Muhammad.

The cartoons were first published in September 2005.

Two of those drawings are cited in the suit: one depicting the prophet greeting suicide bombers in heaven with the caption, “Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins,” and another depicting Muhammad wearing a turban containing a bomb. A third image included in the suit was an original drawing by the French cartoonist Cabu, depicting a crying Muhammad with his head in his hands, saying, “It’s hard to be loved by idiots.”

Outcry in the Muslim world over the Danish cartoons led to violent protests in a number of countries — which resulted in the deaths of at least 50 people — and boycotts of Danish products. A number of other European publications also reprinted the cartoons.

A lawyer for the newspaper on Wednesday read in court a letter of support from Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and the leading conservative presidential candidate. Mr. Sarkozy, whose office said that he had written the letter as a presidential candidate and not as a cabinet minister, said he “preferred an excess of caricature to a lack of caricature.”

In response, representatives of the French Council for the Muslim Religion, a national group that Mr. Sarkozy’s office helped to create, called an emergency meeting.

Another presidential candidate, François Bayrou, and the Socialist Party leader, François Hollande, have been called by the defense to testify.

The issue of whether revisions to the 1901 law separating church and state might be needed has become a topic of discussion in the presidential campaign.

In recent decisions, French courts have largely ruled against religious groups that contended that their faiths had been insulted.

That last observation might suggest that this fellow will get off.

But that is not an adequate response for people who care about free speech.

In this, as in the case in which Christians express opposition to homosexuality, the fact that one might be put on trial for expressing an opinion has a chilling effect.