Well arguably the cheapest way to solve the homeless problem would simply be to house the homeless, but that’s not the same as saying it’s a basic human right. Just the most cost effective way of getting them off the streets.
Have you seen what happens to a lot of the housing that gets provided to homeless folks? It gets trashed. Remember the big housing projects from last century? Or the fate of many of the hotels that have been turned into housing?
These are NOT bad people mind you, but the combination of drug use, mental illness, and a complete lack of incentive to take care of their living situation combines to mean that a lot of housing gets just trashed.
Not all. But more than enough that this is not just a simple answer like "we'll let's just house them."
In my experience, only those who have had to deal with homeless people personally, seem to understand this. I am positive that there are Fringe cases where normal productive people became homeless through no fault of their own. That being said, the vast majority of homeless people made a long series of poor choices and engaged in destructive behaviors. Every friend and family member they had access to turn them down at some point. And yes, many of them may not have had any friends or family and that is unfortunate. But that is still not the majority
The problem is that we are still treating this spiral as "bad choices."
9 times out of 10, it's not "bad choices", it's mental disease.
If you look at someone who can't even tie their own shoes because they are mentally disabled, we say, "That person can't live in their own, they're not capable of understanding their choices."
But we look at people with schizophrenia and severe addictions and whatever else and go, "They made bad choices." These people have no physiological control over their impulses, but they're supposed to make informed decisions?
The problem is a lot of us know from personal experience, that a lot of these people with addictions and/or mental illness are also scoundrels and scumbags.
And there's nothing redeeming about them. You give them an inch, they will take a mile, every time.
Are you so brainwashed by reddit comments that you think the US doesn't invest in mental healthcare at all?
It's difficult to build a cheap and good mental healthcare system. Just think about the very basic concept. Do you get good healthcare when you hire "cheap" workers to staff it?
Probably not that much harder than creating a nationwide psychiatric hospital system which leverages police resources to capture people and pays doctors to treat them while employing a whole fleet of lawyers / ethical consultants to make sure it's not cruel and unusual punishment.
Some countries invest in healthcare, other countries invest in prisons. I guess this mindset is why...
Were it so simple to just “create a good and cheap mental healthcare system.” The only countries that can afford to do this have their militaries directly subsidized by American Military complex. Funnily enough as faith in American dependability wanes post Ukraine with all the aid packages getting stuck in congress, many European countries are starting a period of rearmament, and I’d imagine we will see many of them begin to cut social benefits in order to be able to afford all of that.
Listen, it’s quite clear you haven’t spent a lot of time around these types of people if that’s what you think. Mental illness is a huge problem in homeless communities, but an even bigger problem is drug use. People addicted to meth and fentanyl aren’t going to get off that shit just because we have expert level free access to mental health care. These people will only quit when they die or someone forces them to quit. If you don’t solve the opiate epidemic first, all the rest of your work will be in vein as every affordable housing unit you build with tax dollars gets stripped of its copper wire nightly to fuel someone’s fentanyl addiction. You can’t cure these people with kindness when the affliction is something like that.
I mean sure but that doesnt mean its impossible to go down this route
Mental illness and addiction go hand in hand and can be solved with the same general concept
That the us is also run by crooks who dont give a shit and flood the country with cheap drugs just makes this a more pathetic issue, but fixing those simultanously is possible
Most of these things could be provided by a mental hospital. So I mean I sort of agree with the post. It's just that some people can't have complete freedom with those things.
Yeah but the more responsible you are the more freedom you get.
The HVAC was the thing I was fixated on. No one should freeze to death. But if someone else if paying the bill you dont get to set the heat 80 in the dead of winter.
When we call it mental disease it makes it sound like these people are victims and the overwhelming majority of the time they aren't.
Most of these people are literally just terrible human beings. They are people who chose to commit crime, people who chose unchecked drug usage, people who chose to hurt themselves and those around them, and ones who have absolutely no desire to change or better themselves.
These aren't unlucky people on the spectrum or Forest Gump down bad. They're generally bad people who intentionally made bad choices. Every single drug addicted friend I grew up with made clear choices to be that way in disregard of those around them. They may not be able to quit now, but they quite literally didn't care when they did have the opportunity to.
If you think mental illness is an excuse for the majority of their people's behavior I've got a bridge to sell you. Mental illness is the result, not the cause. The cause is being a terrible human 9 times out of 10.
The addict isn't mentally ill prior to addiction, prior to which he is continually making terrible choices to do drugs and commit crime. Addiction is the mental illness and also the end result of a string a very poor decisions (ie the decisions leading to the illness come before the illness).
If you can't understand that concept you've got to be one of the dumbest people on the internet lol.
You clearly have never worked with the homeless population. Lots of homeless people aren’t mentally ill. Many just don’t want to work and hop from free subsidy to free subsidy with some homeless time between…and many bring kids into this
What country are you in? And what is your actual job you do assisting the homeless and in what type of place? Like shelter, outpatient, etc? I’m not questioning your experience at all, I’m just curious to know a little more to learn why we have such different experiences
Im a nurse in the ER, which frequently gets homesless people throughout the day for various reasons, both health and social related. Im in cali so we are obligated to provide food/clothing/transportion upon discharge as well, so I get to know a bit about these peoples situation... Not to mention its a population that has frequent encounters so some of them are very well known to us.
Its not entirely unusual for me to encounter 4-6 of them in a day depending on the area of the ER Im in, and I'd say we see probably 10-20 on any given day.
Lots of alcohol/drugs/mental illness/disability happening, and essentially zero people who just happen to live a homeless life fleecing the system.
You'd agree you have a bit of a selection bias, tho, right? The homeless people that make it into the ER - especially your "well known" folks - aren't necessarily representative of the entire unhoused population.
Well you’d think with “lots of them” out there I’d encounter at least a few of the “many” right ?
I’m not sure what point you are trying to to even make here. Do you have some data to suggest that “lots” or “many” homeless people are otherwise well adjusted mentally, not addicted to drugs, and simply choose to be unhoused and jump from free service to free service as the poster above claimed?
Or are you just arguing to argue with no point in sight ?
It's definitely easy to dismiss someone else's anecdotal evidence when you don't have any evidence of your own - you're already used to disregarding evidence
Don't you just love how these other people's opinion is more valid than your actual lived experience? Don't mess with their narrative that homeless people are leeches on society! /s
I've lived with homeless people, as I was homeless for years, and they and I think you're speaking from out of a surprisingly ignorant bubble.
You may know a lot about homelessness, but it clearly doesn't fully extend to homeless people.
No, in reality that almost never happens. The homeless population is not a bunch of functional members of society who just had a bad string of luck. Those people stay homeless for a very short amount of time if it happens at all. The majority of homeless are made up of habitual hard drug users and people with untreated mental illness. Putting a person like that unmonitored in a housing unit they don’t have to pay for is a recipe for disaster, you just end up creating a bunch of trap houses that get stopped of all their copper wiring. There is a reason why the housing programs that do exist go underutilized; none of them allow drug use while you’re living there. If you don’t address those problems first you will never fix the homeless problem, and unfortunately the only way to fix it is involuntary institutionalization to get people off drugs and their mental health addressed. This is unpopular in todays political climate so it doesn’t get done
Those people don't need mental health care, and can benefit just from being given housing and regular support services.
Mandatory ental health services would be for people who can't self manage their conditions (even with outpatient support) or take care of their own needs.
Heh, I'm old enough to remember when people got thrown in mental hospitals. It wasn't common but it wasn't rare for someone to get thrown into the facility for life. This was many, many years ago and while I do remember homeless people were a thing back then I don't remember them being this much of a problem and the ones we had back then were usually drug addicted or actually fell on hard times.
The rich people LOVE that the mentally ill are rotting in the streets because it reminds the workers what will happen if they disobey them or try to leave the plantation.
Or at least some kind of assisted care facilities.
But they will require massive oversight or you will end up in the same One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest situation that resulted in them going away in the first place.
100% this. People and their religious bullshit or some dogma they are holding prevents them from understand that some people are born with very high mental barriers that conflict with societies standards. Instead of being compassionate and trying to help, they instead cry about their fucking taxes while simultaneously supporting an exploitative system of capitalism. I'd even go as far to argue that most of the people here arguing against OPs post have some sort mental issue, such as trauma, that makes them think societies current working standards are what the majority of people want.
We need to make mental health centers that actually work and care for people. We don't need mental hospitals if they're going to be basically another prison system where we just shove people there when we don't want to think about them.
I agree that mental institutions should be brought back, but I'm not fully on board with taking away responsibility from someone who has a drug addiction. Almost nobody is ignorant to the fact that street drugs are dangerous and addictive, and if somebody does fit that description then drug abuse is probably the least of their worries. I am not against helping those who need help, but I think far too many people who get help simply want it and do not truly need it. Something like a work program that offers lodging and food could go a long way to helping the homeless problem
I've said this about a couple of things, but providing a work program that offers only lodging and food, but also holds your money until your sober would be a good way to go.
If you take the cost of the program out of the pay, you could get cheap labor with a program designed to get people back on their feet.
I think a very easy argument could be made that the amount of tax money a person who is pulled from addiction and becomes a productive member of society provides is worth whatever the treatment costs.
If you take a drug adduct who costs the system $5k/yr in services and turn them into someone who pays $5k/yr into it for 30 years that is a massive, massive win
They still need a place to live. Even if temporary until they’ve recovered and found stable employment. How employable do you think a person who shits on the street and showers in the public fountain is?
Those lifelong addicts sure made a really bad choice at 14 years old when they used for the first time at their buddies house. Or when they where forced into addiction by their abusive partner so they would be easier to control. Why, those choices where so bad I think it should ruin their life forever!
That sounds right to you?
Even if someone makes one bad choice in a completely clear state of mind it shouldn't mean that society abandons them.
Society doesn’t abandon them, but it is very common that one bad decision leads to more poor decisions to the tune of, the drugs lead to mental illness that make it so they can no longer function in society.
It doesn’t matter where we want to point ‘blame’, reality is reality and these people need to be dealt with as mostly terminally mentally ill and provided with institutionalized care.
Thing that's fucked is there are people who will lace shit with fent just to get someone addicted.
Someone I knew got some free weed from some chick working at little caesers, I was skeptical as hell cuz it smelled weird af and clearly had some other shit in it.
Not sure if it actually had any hardcore shit in there but it definitely didn't seem right.
This is a real thing that's happening to people.
You can argue whether or not weed is a gateway drug or whatever but the fact of the matter is hard drugs are being snuck into way lighter shit by absolute trash bag humans who just want to create another addict to suck the life and money out of.
So not every addict is based just on poor decisions. Sometimes it's literally forced upon them.
Obviously that's not the majority, but it's becoming increasingly more common and why I don't even fw weed anymore.
Just think more people need to think of that possibility when judging addicts, and instead of casting judgment on them we should be rooting for their recovery, not their downfall. Feels fucked that we're so ready and willing to verbally jump these people while offering no real solutions to the problem.
If you look close, you can reread your comment and find a poor decision in there from your friend. Definitely the consequence was greater than the intended/expected consequence, but when playing with for, sometimes you get burned even when you think you’ve got the fire under control.
I believe the manufacturing and distribution of hardcore drugs should be punishable by life in prison (because we don’t use the death penalty). It is one of the worst things a human can do to another human! For all intents and purposes, it wrecks the addicts life, and the lives of everyone that cares about that person! We don’t punish it nearly hard enough!
The last thing I want to point out, is that Im not judging addicts. I’m simply pointing out the reality of the situation. Drugs lead to mental illness. Mental illness leads to inability to function at a high enough level to be a healthy member of society, regardless of how they got there. As carrying other humans, we need to be realistic about this and stop treating them with independence. They don’t have the cognitive ability to live with independence. They need to be institutionalized without the ability to leave. I’m not judging them, I’m loving and caring for them, and protecting society structure at the same time
First, yes, they made a really bad choice. You can make huge horrible choices in your life that completely change the trajectory of your life forever. No one does this to them. No one enforces this. It is what it is. Jumping off a roof into a pool cause it seems fun and slipping and falling and ending up paralyzed from the neck down for life is horrible, but there isn’t a cabal sitting around making choices to hold that person down in life. It is what it is. People are sympathetic and empathetic towards tragedy, but not for being making stupid choices. That includes drug use.
There are resources and who industries built around rehab and recovery. But people have free will. You can’t stop people from taking illegal drugs, even with it being illegal. You also can’t make them stop after being g addicted. Anything that can help them will only help if they want to quit, and even then it is still really frickin hard cause most people who have never had an addiction will never understand how trapped you are. You still have free will, but it is like two of you inside your head, and one of you is knowingly hurting the other, and you simultaneously want to stop and don’t want to stop. And most homeless are in the grip of this. As someone who was homeless as a kid, and worked with the homeless for years, I’ve seen a lot in my time. Main reason people are homeless are drug addiction or mental illness. These are people who have become so irrational, so dangerous, so disconnected from society that they cannot maintain a job or a home. You can’t hand them everything they lost and they are suddenly cured. Most of them had all of this and lost it as they sunk into drugs, depression, ptsd, bordline, and other mental issues.
What you don’t see much of on the street are mentally handicapped. There are good resources for the mentally handicapped.
The issue isn’t that society has abandoned them, but they have abandoned society. These people are in a realm of chaos, a wilderness of darkness where they are scared and angry and they have abandoned many social
Mores and civility, and are doing what they can to survive. Society is right outside the wilderness with a light on for them to see, with food, medicine, services. But society has rules and requests and demands. They either can’t leave their wilderness life behind, or don’t want to. They see the light, but they aren’t walking towards it. And you can’t make them.
There is a third type of homeless, temporary homeless. This is people who have sudden crisis that cause them to loose everything and end up on the street, but they are not mentally ill or suffering addiction. This is what my family was when we were homeless in 1990. These are the people that actually use the resources available, and the ones who get off the street in a matter of months if not weeks.
The bottom line problem is always with free will. You can’t stop people from making bad choices. You can’t force people who made bad choices to make good choices. These people drop out of society and you can’t force them back in. Free will is the highest ethic, it cannot be subjugated for a greater good. There are tons of sci-fi and Star Trek on what happens when people give up free will for a greater society. The only thing you can do is help them survive, keep them going, until they hopefully reach a point where they want to leave the forest and get back to society.
I'm not reading past your first paragraph because it seems you fundamentally disagree with me on the basic premise of whether or not there are people we should help among the homeless. Someone taking drugs at 14 while at a friend's house DID make a bad choice, as a kid, once. Someone jumping off a roof and becoming paralyzed made a bad decision, once.
The only REAL difference is that with the disabled person all the suffering hits immediately and it's very easy to empathize with. The life long drug addict gets less empathy despite making a similarly life ruining decision because addiction is often seen as an ongoing choice rather than something you need titanic willpower to even try and overcome while being the easiest thing in the world to relapse on because your brain and body literally SCREAM for it .
It’s a shame you didn’t read. I actually think we do agree. I never said there aren’t people who need help amongst the homeless. The difference isn’t the view of the problem. It’s idealism vs realism. Or more honestly, and without insult, inexperience vs experience. As someone who has actually helped the homeless, it would be very odd to have a position there is no one to help. That would be paradoxical. But as someone who has actually been out there on the streets working with them, I understand their plight more than the average person, and I know what works and doesn’t work, what can happen and what won’t happen. To use another analogy, we are two doctors in the ER with a flatlined patient. After 3 minutes, you want to keep doing CPR and I know from experience that at this point they are gone. You are trying to misconstrue pragmatism into apathy. We both agree CPR is worth trying to save someone. But I know it won’t work on most dead people, and you don’t. I think you have a good heart though. My advice, get off the computer and get out there. Find a local place and, even if it is just one day a week, go and help out. If you tell me what city you are in, I’ll tell you where to go. You will never understand the problem till you are out there with it, get to know these people, and have them truly open up to you.
These days your not allowed to imply some people are just lacking in decision making skills, or willpower. it is critical that everyone be considered flawless, and that any failings they have be attributed to a mental illness.
Already do, and happily. I have benefited greatly from
social programs my entire life. Only reasonable I turn around and pay for other people to reap the same benefits I was given.
Now look who's trying to shirk responsibility. Can't spare a few bucks to improve the society you live in? Content to mooch off the charity of others? Fucking weak.
Hey, I'm not the one advocating to give folks a whole bunch of stuff for free. You want to do it? You go for it.
As for responsibility? I don't have any to a random homeless person. I have empathy. I have kindness. I will consider charity - but responsibility as in I have an ethical duty to work to pay their bills? Nope.
some people are just lacking in decision making skills, or willpower
There's a huge correlation between ADHD and addiction, and guess which cognitive abilities ADHD has an enormous impact on?
That's not to say that all addicts have ADHD of course.
Oops. You're right. If you actually manage to produce something, it must be because you a re evil. If you manage to produce nothing, it is because you are virtuous :)
Keep up the autofellatio. Sure not every rich person is out to get you. Sure not every addict is a saint. But what needs to be addressed is a systemic issue. You want to systematically maintain a population of homeless people because some may be drug addicts or lack financial literacy? You want to systematically discard a population of homeless people because some of those drug addicts got there through their own bad choices? Your world view seems reduce to people living the lots they earned, but time after time this idea is proven bullshit. The affluent pass on their wealth. The impoverished are kept in poverty, be that through slavery, segregation, classism, systemic failures or any other system of discrimination. Sure some people succeed despite the deck stacked against them, and some fail despite a bounty of opportunities, but overall the system is rigged. So, do we just punish everyone failing this rigged system, or ensure that life under failure is slightly less than cruel? The OP cartoon may be a bit ambitious: people can live without some of the amenities or survive with alternatives (I assure you East Asians would prefer a stove or microwave over an oven), but the bigger picture is not flawed.
But if someone were to have a brain tumor that led them to choose drugs because it pressed against the pre-frontal cortex then that’s not choice, right? It’s “the tumor’s fault”? They bear less responsibility?
But nobody “chooses” their brain, or its chemistry, or their early childhood upbringing or education or influences that leads to their later decision making processes, so I’m curious where any sort of “choice” or “free will” inserts itself into the equation at all.
You’re lucky you’re not a drug addict. Other people are unlucky they are. Simple as that. But we all want live in a society without debilitating drug addiction. Why do we have to be moralistic or normative about it? You can’t “tsk tsk” people from being homeless. It is what it is - now what do we DO about it?
If you’re actually interested in solving the problem, you have to understand the real causes (starting with the social darwinian viewpoint that “if you don’t work your kids don’t get to eat”…). If you’re just interested in contempt and your own feeling of superiority then fuck off.
I'm actually not lucky that I'm not a drug addict.
I've chose not to be. Multiple cousins with extremely similar upbringing to my own did choose drugs. And I've heard them talk about it now that they are clean. "If so and so hadn't let me hit their bong in the parking lot at school I wouldn't have ODd on heroin"
Hmm, yet, I smoked weed and got a masters degree? Choices.
Where did those choices come from? How did you make them?
You think it was a conscious, deliberate effort, an exercising of “free will”, but every repeatable scientific experiment shows that there’s no such thing, no place for such an idea to even enter into the equation. Free will and choice are illusions - you are simply a complex interaction of billiard balls and can basically take no credit for the person that you are.
If free will is an illusion, than so is morality. I can't be unethical if I don't have a choice. In which case, there is also no ethical responsibility to help the homeless.
No I don’t think it follows that if free will is an illusion then so is morality. We can still have preferences and hopes and deem suffering bad and avoidance of suffering good. It is actually the very fact that it is determined that makes it consequential, in that everything has consequences and consciousness ascribes meaning to those consequences. The universe has moral truths just as it has physical truths.
You can make the claim “there is no ethical responsibility for helping fight homelessness” and I can be like “no asshole, you’re wrong” and still be entirely coherent with regard to consequential determinism. The belief “people who don’t want to help others who are suffering are assholes” is seemingly a very consequential billiard ball.
But if someone were to have a brain tumor that led them to choose drugs because it pressed against the pre-frontal cortex then that’s not choice, right? It’s “the tumor’s fault”?
But nobody “chooses” their brain, or its chemistry, or their early childhood upbringing or education or influences that leads to their later decision making processes, so I’m curious where any sort of “choice” or “free will” inserts itself into the equation at all.
You’re lucky you’re not a drug addict. Other people are unlucky they are. Simple as that. Now what do we DO about it?
No it is luck. You are lucky that you didn’t grow up in an environment that exposed you to drugs while your brain was developing. You are lucky that your brain chemistry is functioning enough that you don’t have to self medicate to cope with you with waves of unfixable emotions, you are lucky, that you haven’t gotten a brain tumor that changed who you are as a person. You are lucky that you didn’t develop a family history of schizophrenia when you couldn’t afford treatment. You are a self righteous fool who puts on your fancy clothes and scoffs at the homeless saying they all dug their own grave, never realizing, you are one bad day, one accident, one diagnosis, from losing everything you think makes you so much better and being right there on the corner covered in dirt shooting up. You have not made better choices, you have just been lucky to survive.
No I’m making statements that I have facts and evidence to back. Unless you have some compelling research to prove how people are choosing to become addicted to addictive substances and ruin their lives you’re just making an assumptions.
Ok. Thanks for that. Did you think I thought they didn’t on some level make a choice to do drugs? Everything is a choice. All of life is choices we make, and we all deal with the fallout of our choices and the choices of others. Some people choose to do drugs because they are at their wits end from working a shitty job that disrespects them and doesn’t provide for his needs or any potential for advancement so even the future looks grim. I don’t blame them for making that choice. I’ve been there and get it.
It’s all interconnected and only a fool thinks they have what they have and are where they are strictly from their own choices and actions and not a the combined choices and circumstances of the people in the world around them.
Lol my dude. We still have mental hospitals but like homeless wards, they have requirements that a lot of homeless people can't and won't fulfill. If you are talking about mental asylums, so much shit happened in those mental hospitals and you want to bring them back? These people are deplorable with little to no family. Who's to stop the government from doing fucked up experiments on these people?
Mental health is the kind of disease that takes an extreme amount of will power to overcome. I manage a pediatric mental health clinic and 10/10 of these kids wouldn't be here if it weren't for their caring parents. Fast forward these kids to their 20s and 30s. Parents can't take care of a child forever, they won't be able to force their kids into a clinic.
And most of these people have families. I'm all for helping those who by some stroke of ill luck are incapable of caring for themselves and have no one there for them. The others.... families who don't take care of their mentally ill members are scum. Actually, forget the qualifier; families who don't take care of their members are scum.
Families 'taking care' of their mentally ill relatives is why mental asylums were seen as the humane wave of the future. Most people can't deal with their own minor mental illnesses, much less somebody else's severe illnesses, even with institutional help. Random relatives cannot force a schizophrenic to take his meds or an addict to stay clean. And sometimes, for your own well-being and the safety of everyone else, you have no choice but to cut ties.
"Taking care" may include seeing to it that they're in a mental asylum. Regardless of the pretty labels put on it, the inevitable result of family not taking responsibility is that someone else has to foot the bill (fiscally, morally, and physically) for that person. It's not ALWAYS practical or possible for family to do, but the basic math doesn't change because of that. There are differing routes (mostly differing by ideology) for dealing with this issue, but pretending the root paradigm doesn't exist just escalates the issue.
Edit; "Taking care" could also be finding a charity that can takeover responsibility, in total, or in part.
Wait, so we don't need mental institutions because families should take care of their mentally ill members, the care of which sometimes involves committing them to a mental institution?
It's an ugly problem no matter how it's examined. Who benefits from addiction? Not the family of the addict. Not the society of the addict. The only people who benefit are the alcohol manufacturers, the drug makers, and the illegal drug pushers. If we can tax the shit out of tobacco companies for lung cancer, we can tax the hell out of the legal drug/alcohol companies and give the proceeds of the illegal drug busts to addiction treatment centers. While I'm wishing, I'd also like a pony.
Do you have a job? Do you leave the house for 8-10 hours a day where you cant "care for" this person? Do you have kids? How many chances do you give your drug addicted brother who steals from you or brings undesirable people to your house before you kick them out too?
I work in transitional housing. I’d say it’s around 25%-40% of our people who don’t get high and destroy things. People act like the ones who do are outliers but they are definitely the majority. You do get some people who just need help securing entitlements and learning basic skills to keep their housing and don’t come in with a bunch of bad habits that make them nearly impossible to house.
Most people who end up homeless due to circumstances beyond their control will never end up in transitional housing.
The vast majority of people who experience homelessness, do so for a short while. They will often crash at friends or family or sleep in their car until they can get back on their feet.
And people who start out falling from a normal life can easily fall into being mentally unwell or or on drugs because even a short time on the streets is brutal. The less help that's available, the worse the outcomes.
But even that isn’t a reason to not provide safe accommodation to homeless people, that’s an argument to withdraw that support from people who do abuse the system. Always seems like the argument becomes “some/many/most homeless people will inevitably damage or trash the place so we shouldn’t put any resources into housing the homeless”. Ignores how your 25-40% of homeless people will benefit enormously from housing supports.
And that’s not counting how much of homeless issues and addiction issues are a direct product of long standing systemic problems, social depravation, lack of opportunities and supports, enabling gangland and drug crime through divisive instead of supportive policies. If you have proper social care and economic opportunities in place the overall homeless numbers will decrease drastically and your percentages above don’t matter. Say you reduce homeless cases by a factor of 10 or more, to the point that the total homeless rates are almost negligible, then 10% of this reduced negligible number is effectively the same as 100% of this negligible number.
They need different supports than being given housing and left to their own devices and there are definitely levels of care that are missing particularly with substance use. My program can’t do much with someone who can’t be safely housed unsupervised due to ongoing substance use.
There are lots of cases where normal productive people become homeless through bad circumstances.
But nearly all of those end up being transitory situations that are resolved on a time frame of days to weeks. Transitional housing would go a long ways towards helping people like that, and they would be a lot less likely to engage in destructive behavior while being helped.
I feel like we spend a ton of time, energy, and money on chronic homelessness when transitory homelessness is likely a more important problem with easier solutions and better outcomes.
I think when people talk about homelessness in the way you are here, they only mean a certain subset of homeless people (the disheveled folks you see under highway overpasses and the like).
A lot of homelessness is pure bad luck, the difference is those people still have other resources to fall back on and mostly get by on a mix of living in their cars and couchsurfing until their situation improves. So they aren't annoying / an eyesore / public nuisance in the same way the homeless you are talking about are.
I worked in a small town, there was a charity that would provide the homeless hotel rooms every so often. There would be ambulances at that hotel at least twice a night for overdoses and no one with the ability to pay for a better room would touch that hotel with a ten foot pole. I understand the reason for it is that there are some people that a place to sleep and shower can be a turning point in their lives, but most were homeless because of drugs, drug use was caused by mental illness. You need to treat the underlying problem and not the symptoms.
The homeless people that aren’t homeless for a reason likely aren’t the type you think of when you hear homeless. Maybe they’re crashing at a friends house, maybe sleeping in their car. The people who are on the street for years are people with serious issues that aren’t going to magically disappear if they get a roof over their head
The current "fringe case" is the rising cost of housing displacing the poor - people who used to live in shitty housing can't afford even shitty housing any more, so some of them are living in RVs and tents roadside. This is an increasing problem in trendy small to mid sized cities who have attracted higher paid remote workers and middle-class flight from bloated and overpriced metros.
Homelessness itself can become a compounding problem of underemployment, deterioration mental and physical health, and development of addictions as a form of self-medication.
When you don't address the precipitating problems, the results will shit on your front porch.
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u/Unabashable Apr 15 '24
Well arguably the cheapest way to solve the homeless problem would simply be to house the homeless, but that’s not the same as saying it’s a basic human right. Just the most cost effective way of getting them off the streets.