This morning I watched a debate on SVT. The moderator was Pär Westerberg, former leader of Folkpartiet Liberalerna, now working for the Red Cross. The topic was housing for the homeless and it touched upon the complexity of the problem. Should one for instance plan for extremely plain apartments so that the people outside the common society (drug addicts, the mentally troubled, the very sick and the poor) can afford them? On the one hand, it’s naïve to think these people can do well on the unregulated market, where these people have totally other preconditions than the vast majority of people. On the other hand, such apartments would certainly be new-built ghettos. I’m not fully sure which way to go. I guess it’s a choice between making a point and making a difference. If I had to chose, I’d built the ghettos. I’m very pragmatic in that sense. I try to picture myself homeless and needing a fix just to feel alive. I’d think it would be perfectly fine with living in a ghetto at that point. Baby steps are better than no steps at all.
In order to move on, you must have a starting point somewhere. Whole societies similar to Christiana in Copenhagen might be useful and more common in the future. A ghetto is defined as: "portion of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure”. Christiana ought to be regarded as mainly a result of social pressure. Economic pressure could make rise to other types of ghettos, new-built ones. Such could reduce the threshold of getting back to a meaningful life, I think, even if we'd hope for an even better solution. At least, thinking differently is a first step of thinking better.
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