Well the thing is, the budget is that small. Otherwise why would there be a five year waitlist for government housing? You’re talking like a budget that could house everyone but only in boring housing is small. But the current budget, there’s no way it can house everyone in any conditions at all. Every extra apartment we can build is another person off the street or out of the homeless shelters. That’s the scale we’re talking about here. There is no extra, there is no slack, and there’s nothing we could possibly do to stretch the budget enough to create slack. But what we can do is stretch the budget enough to give one more person a home, and I think that’s the most important thing.
Sorry, I did say if the government built block housing there would be almost no homeless. I was at the time imagining a fantasy world where the government gets its shit together and actually tries to solve the homeless problem. Take this current comment as assuming that the government doesn’t decide to tax the rich appropriately to fund this endeavour.
One trick is to tell stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville? I needed a new heel for m’shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. “Gimme five bees for a quarter,” you’d say. Now where were we? Oh, yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…