Gongol.com Archives: July 2025
July 26, 2025
In theory, Tesla has unintentionally solved homelessness in America: With the advent of full self-driving mode, a person could soon plausibly sleep behind the wheel of a moving vehicle without a hazard to self or others. Such is America's cultural commitment to freedom of movement (particularly by roads) that we never challenge anyone over the mere fact of traveling from place to place, and we commit seemingly endless public funds to furnishing the pavement upon which vehicles may freely travel. ■ Thus, once "self-driving" no longer requires driver supervision, anyone with a fully self-driving vehicle could, in theory, get a sheltered night's sleep while driving aimlessly about the streets of a community, even if they could not afford permanent shelter where they wanted to be. ■ This argument is, of course, an exercise in stretching a question to logical absurdity. It does, however, highlight a serious conflict in public policy: We provide almost lavishly for people to be in motion, but we often adopt a conflicting mess of barriers to maximizing the supply of places for people to be (literally and figuratively) at rest. ■ Perhaps the most extreme demonstration of that imbalance is the fact that the construction of the Interstate Highway System alone probably displaced about a million people from their established homes. People in motion were given priority; people at rest were literally forced to make way. ■ With "homelessness" writ large thrusting itself to the front pages of the news, it's worth a reminder that people find themselves without shelter for all kinds of reasons, some self-imposed, some by external circumstances, and others by a combination of the two. ■ But we won't get very far in the effort to alleviate their problems without seeing that secure, dignified housing is a continuum -- some have a lot of it, some have none, and others have less than they want. Finding ways to produce a lot of it benefits practically everyone (though it would benefit even more in practical terms if we could decouple home prices from the accumulation of household wealth). Nor will we do ourselves any good if we ignore the inconsistency between how we treat the very same people through public policies, depending on whether they are in motion or not.
