Cap’n, I HAVE been homeless… Not the couch surfing kind either.
What is being build it out of sight, out of mind shanty towns. It’s a stop gap, like so many “feel good” help them out programs.
Until corporations pay their fair share, this will go on and we’ll continue to stuff mentally/ill into places like and chant “at least they’re free!”
I am reminded of an NPR program a few weeks back that profiled a homeless man who died on the streets of Oakland.
He’d drifted from his home state of Wisconsin to Illinois to Missouri to California. Lost in illness and addiction. His family in Wisconsin begged him to come home and he refused.
The tag line was the he lived his life the way HE wanted to.
My tag line is, He made his choice our problem.
I’m certainly don’t know what the solution is, but like pornography, I sure know the problem when I see it.
Not sure of you’re point there, that the homeless are to blame or something else?
You know what, you start out like that, never mind.
Because a comment on a message board needs to fucking grammar checked like a professional document…
Especially in a day & age when even newspapers and news stations aren’t adhering to that standard.
If he was lost in mental illness and addiction then a rational choice, at least as we understand it, wasn’t involved here.
With a small number of exceptions (old-style hobos and crustpunks) most homeless people are not making the choice to live ze romantic life of ze vagabond. The vast majority have been forced into it by bad economic circumstances, addiction, mental illness, a abusive home situation (for runaways), a natural disaster, or some combination of those situations.
In most of those cases, it’s an uncaring and unforgiving conservative/Libertarian political and economic culture and its deeply considered choice to tell Americans “I’ve got mine, Jack, You’re own your own” that’s caused the problem for the last 40 years. In every one of those situations I listed above I can point to a GOP or Third Way Dem policy that reduced the range of choices available to a homeless person.
My tag line is: as a nation we’ve allowed greedheads to determine how we live our lives since 1980; it’s everyone’s problem now.
If you are going to chase grammar, I will have to look at your standards of evidence.
That was your experience. However, the plural of anecdote is not data. I will not argue that there are some individuals who prefer to remain homeless. But they are hugely in the minority. Those who do not wish to be aren’t aren’t able to magically wish it away. There are no bootstraps.
It’s very easy to become homeless. All it takes is for someone (or entity) richer and more powerful than you to set their sights either on you, or what you have. For every person like you who grabbed help, another was turned away, and even more are too tired to jump through those hoops.
Most people respond well when help is presented with minimal or no strings attached. Sometimes what’s presented as “help” is more detrimental, or is exactly what put someone in their position to start with.
What’s most disturbing is your apparent willingness to cast a person – who from the sounds of things is not a threat to others – as a “problem”.
Ahem… that should read “another’s” (Muphry’s Law strikes again!).
Also, mental illness is often physiological in nature and can indeed be treated by a third party with the right combination of medications and talk therapy. The key is taking such a person off the streets and placing him in a supportive and stable environment* where he will be less tempted to go off his meds.
[* not this prefab gated camp, which is basically a tidied-up version of the shelters so many homeless people avoid]
cost isn’t the issue, it’s the potential neighbors…
a) complaining about shadows on their property
b) not wanting poors living next to them
Those potential neighbors happen to be sitting on real estate whose value can fund their efforts to make sure nothing gets built. Blaming this on tight-fisted technocrats or whoever is really beside the point.
And a double-down, from yet another guy who “just can’t help himself:”
Hopefully they collect a lot of data on this project. If they can show that it does work, maybe they can go for real housing the next time, or someone elsewhere can.
Admittedly good data that something works doesn’t always convince some people. (See injection sites.)
Utah (of all places) has shown that giving real places to stay + support, leads to savings on other parts of the budget.
Turns out, apartments with real amenities are cheaper than repeated hospital stays.
Unfortunately, we’re stuck arguing with people who say “well, my house isn’t free, why should I pay for theirs?”
It’s like the battle over health care, only worse.
