Yes, charitable organizations are unfortunately corrupt.

You definitely don’t need to (and shouldn’t!) go as far as Japan, but even in places with abundant space like America or Australia, there are huge advantages to keeping homes relatively smaller in terms of land-area per-person. (Floor space can stay higher by: building multi-storey row houses, building apartments, reducing private lawn areas, etc.)

Keeping things less spread out is much, much more affordable. Fewer roads to maintain, fewer ks of electricity, sewerage, and Internet infrastructure, etc. It makes public transport run much more efficiently, which reduces the cost of operating it, which means you get more of it. This makes it a better service, which means people use it, which takes cars off the road, which makes congestion less of a problem, which makes getting around faster. Ditto the cost and usability of bike paths and nice pedestrian footpaths, which become more usable as a result of things being literally closer together, resulting in a store you might once have had to drive to get to being possible to walk to now. This in turn makes things more affordable for individuals, because they might not need to pay the huge prices associated with cars (buying the thing, maintenance, insurance, petrol) if they can get around by bike and public transport. Or at the very least, a family can drop down from 2 or 3 cars to just 1 being enough.

It makes housing more affordable, since instead of paying for 300 sq m of land per 100 sq m of floor space, you might now be paying 50 sq m or less of land per 100 sq m floor space. And because things a denser, your commute can drop from potentially over an hour to something reasonable like less than 30 minutes.

Oh, no argument here at all. I’m simply saying that a perfectly livable micro home could be the answer for those who would bitch about “I’m paying for my home and theirs is nicer” or similar.

Make a home that is adequate, but most would want to improve their lives and move out of.

Of course I’m more a supporter of UBI, which would likely solve this issue among many others if properly implemented. But that’s a different topic completely.

Maybe your opinion is that housing is a human right but I’m not sure where you are drawing that definitive conclusion from. Are you saying it’s a legal right somewhere or that it’s your emotional stance?

The right to housing is a fundamental human right, according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many international treaties and agreements since. As the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights puts it:

Adequate housing was recognized as part of the right to an adequate standard of living in article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in article 11.1 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Other international human rights treaties have since recognized or referred to the right to adequate housing or some elements of it, such as the protection of one’s home and privacy.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/human-right-adequate-housing

Your personal experience has given you an incorrect belief regarding the human right to housing. I’m sorry to call you out so directly, but sometimes people need to hear hard truths. Facts don’t care about your feelings.

There is a substantial argument for housing being a right, and also let’s get real - it’s bad for a government to be so unstable they can’t give adequate housing to everyone. It’d bad at a societal level even if it theoretically didn’t violate individual rights.

https://journals.openedition.org/interventionseconomiques/6499

51 Historical analysis reveals that American policymakers have consistently used happiness discourse and a specific notion of virtue to promote an ownership model of wellbeing. The eighteenth-century use of the term “happiness”—namely, a stable feeling of fulfillment and wellbeing that results from a virtuous way of life—was pivotal in forging a lasting rhetorical link between the pursuit of happiness and the lifestyle induced by property ownership. As if they were reading from James Truslow Adams’ playbook, subsequent generations of Americans appear to have unwaveringly stood up to save the American Dream of homeownership from any opposing forces (Adams 2017 [1931]). As the frontier reached the Pacific and small farmland became scarce, suburban crabgrass (Jackson 1985) became the next frontier to conquer for Americans in search of homeownership. As suburbanization fueled an urban crisis for many poor minorities, the Civil Rights Movement sparked political change in the 1960s that would attempt to give equal homeownership opportunities to all Americans regardless of skin color, sex, or origin. Then as unfavorable economic conditions made housing credit scarce, financial deregulation was used to keep the American Dream of homeownership alive. Even the subprime mortgage crisis, in which deregulation played a strong role, has barely put a dent in Americans’ attachment to the homeownership way of life.

From a theoretical standpoint, the long-term resistance and flexibility of this model, both in discourse and in practice, must be traced back to the fundamental contradiction between the universality of the principles enshrined in the nation’s founding documents, in which the link between the pursuit of happiness and ownership is institutionalized, and the reality of the racial, gender and class inequalities in the United States regarding property ownership. This is what makes the homeownership society a permanent horizon, a utopian dream for all Americans to strive for by overcoming whatever political, social, or economic obstacles they come across; and it’s the pursuit of this dream, not necessarily the achievement of it, that is presented as the gateway to happiness and virtue. As such, politicians can constantly reactivate this discourse to bolster support for either conservative or progressive policies that alternate between saving an ownership model in danger and expanding it toward new frontiers. By channeling political resistance toward the improvement or greater accessibility of a homeownership model, the validity of the model itself remains unquestioned. Happiness politics based on this model thus constructs and reconstructs loyalty to the American capitalist regime of private property by presenting obstacles to homeownership as an opportunity to defend the American way of life, while alternatives to the dream of homeownership are considered an un-American road to vice and unhappiness.

Of course, what is claimed in political discourse about homeownership and happiness should not be taken at face value, even if polls and the concrete living situation of the majority of Americans attest to a strong relationship between the two. While there is still more comparative research to be conducted on the strengths and weaknesses of renting and homeownership on various dimensions of wellbeing, this brief historical analysis may open up a new dimension somewhat specific to the United States. When homeownership has been culturally presented as the only virtuous and truly American gateway to happiness, can this lead to a feeling of being un-American, or a failed American, if one is either unable or unwilling to conform? To what extent is it important to have the same housing lifestyle as one’s fellow citizens to feel part of the national community? In other words, the effect of associating patriotic attitudes with specific ways of life—such as owning a house in the suburbs—on subjective wellbeing could be a new avenue to explore in happiness research.

Income limit would lead to people ‘gaming’ the system. Either just misreporting what they actually make or purposefully not making enough to qualify.

Or it will go just like current systems do - you make one cent over their arbitrarily decided number and you don’t qualify even if you cant actually afford to live.

It would also screw over people who might have a ‘good’ income, but made honest mistakes and are upside down in debt or similar situations.

Income limit fosters a ‘you deserve this, you don’t’ attitude which is what we are trying to get away from.

I just see a time limit system (with exceptions for those who are sick/unable to fully care for themselves) doing a better job of providing a basic human right to anyone who needs it while avoiding a bunch of bullshit an income limit would bring to the table.

There are major problems with income based limits. In theory they work, but they often break down over time locking people into the poverty they are trying to escape. It creates a grey area where they lose more than they gain by improving their income. Sometimes as much as an hour of extra work can lose them their benefits.