The #1 cause of homelessness is housing costs, 30% to 40% of homeless people, and property taxes are 20% - 35% of housing costs nationally.

Somehow, the government has never thought to study what % of homelessness is caused by property taxes.

So I did a little math.

150k property tax evictions annually.

Average 2.5 people displaced.

Conservatively, 12.5% of them fail to find other housing.

Around 50k homeless people annually directly attributed to property tax evictions. Which is around 10% of all homeless people.

Probably much higher since that is property tax evictions of owners only, renters who were evicted but could have afforded 30% lower rent are likely much higher.

Anyway, just me thinking out loud about potential arguments against statists. Focusing on trying to convert lefties these days since they are most unhappy with their government right now.

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I'm gonna need your sources for my own debates with statists.

Just chatting with an LLM. The most fucked up part to me is that there are no sources, no one has thought to ask the question. Or, perhaps it is intentionally overlooked because the people most interested in homelessness are for state expansion based solutions.

Try Perplexity. It has footnotes to the sources for every answer.

I'm sure you could find primary sources for things like housing is the cause, and tax foreclosures. I couldn't find info on residents per foreclosure and % of foreclosed who found alternative housing.

For the same reason the singular cause of inflation is always overlooked, so too is tax (unless it is for political points against the other strawman party). Nobody in the mainstream wants to go there. However, I think that aside from rent/mortgage, property tax is the single highest post-tax financial burden.

And that is just 1 tax.

my housing cost is less than 5% of assessed value including school taxes. move your residence in US

I didn't say what mine are, only national numbers.

Telling people to move is a non-answer. Most of the time moving makes things worse. Those who stay out the longest have the lowest living cost

I was ignoring the time cost to rebuild a garden with comparable output on a new plot of land. But yeah, waiting another 3-5 years for fruit trees to start putting off fruit matters to those of us who aren't immortal.

if your attached to your property, I get it.

I do believe in arbitrage as a capitalistic and person financial approach