Someone needs to open a Penny Leaner and Coffin Bed Hall and our return to Victorian times will be closer to complete.
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penal colony
Finland?
I think the point is that Finland treats homeless people as people who need homes, rather than as criminals who need to be imprisoned or moved on.
That is, Finland is not acting like a Penal Colony.
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Makes more sense now…
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A good start, that can be increased with things like free, and rigorous, mental healthcare where people are living. Pop-up medical clinics. Get the churches and non-profits who already feed people who are houseless to do it for the newly houses. Maybe even gasp pay people to check in on those who need medication and help them remember to take it.
There will still be people who cannot live outside of some more structured framework. But doing this would help find those people and get them to places where they can be cared for but have as much independence as possible.
It would take so much work. And so much money. But I think we could do it.
ETA: and pair with programs to prevent people from losing their homes in the first place
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The current way takes a lot of work and money. The “housing first” approach, where it’s being sincerely tried, seems to be saving money overall. Which I found kind of amazing - I was in favour of it for humanitarian reasons. I never expected it to be economically better.
It grates a lot of people the wrong way - people who feel like someone is getting something extra for free. And that seems to be the biggest stumbling block: the political issues, and how to persuade a large group of people to try something new.
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This part cannot be emphasized enough. But I meant the other stuff- the healthcare and social services where people are- would cost a lot. Mostly because our healthcare is so expensive (fucking profit model of healthcare). Though probably not as much as jailing people who are houseless
The work I’m referring to is mostly work in changing people’s minds about how this issue should be solved. A big part of that is convincing these “nobody should get a free ride” types to realize that helping the people who are the worst off benefits everyone in real ways, including monetary.
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yeah. this. to me it seems similar to drug decriminalization. there’s a reaction if results aren’t seen immediately – even though the crime and punishment method has been failing for decades.
plus, it’s hard to exactly measure the cost of homelessness on police, jails, and emergency room visits. where housing is an obvious per-person line item.
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Particularly when two of those three entities are highly resistant to studying the issue
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… the best “shelter” that someone is getting for free has to be worse than the worst housing that anyone is paying for, or the economy will cry 
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Have they considered, maybe, also striking down the laws that make it absurdly difficult or expensive to build and access more & cheaper housing? No? Didn’t think so.
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Most of the places that have decided on homes first programs have followed up the annual expenditures their city made on the homeless-arrests, ER visits and so on, and figured it was way cheaper to cut down on those numbers by getting people homes. Also, there tend to be a relatively small number of the long-term homeless who generate most of the trouble, usually for public intoxication, trespassing, urination in the wrong place, harassing people and so on. Those few also end up needing the most medical care, which can quickly add up if there is no safe pace for them to be discharged to.
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Yep.
My understanding is that “housing first” can be a tricky sell because the actual costs to the taxpayer of homelessness is a “death by a thousand cuts” situation - it’s a myriad of small daily expenditures that are hard to catalogue in advance. The benefits start to appear a year or three afterward, and proving that it’s not an anomaly is not trivial.
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I feel like Americans have so internalized the capitalist propaganda, they end up blaming themselves when things go wrong. (Or worse, blaming the out groups Republicans point them at.)
If Trump wins and actually starts building the concentration camps for the homeless that he’s promised, I don’t know what’s going to happen…
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Mary and Joseph, you’re under arrest for sleeping in a barn. Just because there was no room at the inn doesn’t give you the right to seek shelter anywhere you want.
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Court is a public place. Could they prosecute a “high value” serial snoozer, to set an example? Let him sleep it off?
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This is my point, I guess. The majority of the unhoused just need a hand up to get back on their feet. That remaining 14% or so will require significant investment of time and money to get anywhere near functional. My fear is that the folks who don’t want any help for these folks at all will seize on this to deny all assistance. “We spent all that money and there are still homeless people spoiling my views!” kind of thing. It’s just reality that there are going to be folks who are hard to reach, hard to help. The housing first approach is a very good thing, and should be pursued. But it’s not the end of the story. That’s just reality.
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This is true of a huge number of social programs. In the US, if we’ve determined we need a program to help people for any reason, there’s a huge chance we’ve built that program in the most inefficient way possible.
And this is the reason it is built in an inefficient way.
Most programs are built not with a requirement to help people but more with a requirement to make sure nobody gets anything they shouldn’t get. They end up spending more money preventing people from getting help, exclude more people that need help vs helping people that don’t need help, and are overall more expensive to run all to meet this requirement.
All the inefficiencies around means testing to get help is way more expensive and excludes more people who need help, than just helping a few extra people that might not need the help as much.
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Unfortunately, some in power aren’t looking at the cost of this - it’s potential profit to them:
The same forces behind creating and maintaining the school-to-prison pipeline see this as another way to keep up the for-profit prison population.
The GOP is all about promoting fear and anger - especially if they can profit from it in terms of money and power. In this case, the selfishness and anger over what’s presented as a handout shifts the fear-mongering usually associated with the issue.
Instead of promoting empathy by reminding people how close they are to homelessness themselves, they support the myth that it’s only decades of hard labor that will keep workers from the same fate. They also rarely report the statistics about the working poor or hard-working seniors who become homeless due to healthcare issues, a lifetime of low wages, or death of spouse/divorce.
I would argue that’s not how they started, but what conservatives are doing a lot of work to ensure they will become. It’s their not-so-subtle way of killing assistance, because they don’t approve of it at all.
Sadly, we’ve got courts stacked with GOP picks who believe in bootstraps, ladder-pulling, and moves like this…
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