Ahh, Rick Baker, you've finally got the homeless problem all figured out.

The BBQ Pit
41

The problem is multifold, sure. I’m suspicious of purported “solutions” that don’t take this into account - that’s a sure sign of someone selling an agenda rather than a fix.

I don’t want to make this issue so big as to make it unsolvable, but housing policy does play a role. So do welfare rates and residency requirements for them - this is why San Francisco traditionally had such a big homeless problem. Government shelters have their role to play, but so do private charities, which are more likely to insist on good behavior and work among the people they help.

I think laws ought to be set fairly and enforced fairly. The homeless do not have the right to panhandle, extort money by squeegeeing car windshields, urinate or defecate in public, engage in public sex or prostitution, drink on the street or use illegal drugs. If they refrain from doing these things, they ought to be left alone. Public bathrooms should be reopened for them, even if the entrances have to be monitored.

Even if we do all that we can, there will be a small subset of people who choose to drift about the fringe of society. Some of these folks were mentioned above. If they are not criminals, they should be left alone as free individuals in a free country dealing with the consequences of their freely made choices, however unwise we would consider them.

42

I thought you meant it when you said this -

So, in this instance, you aren’t willing to do more than hand out stale, over-priced water. But, unless we are willing to throw lots more money at the problem, we lack “compassion”.

Not to mention -

So, again, you are not willing to contribute money unless you are forced to do so.

IOW, you won’t contribute to private organizations because they don’t have enough money. Sort of like Yogi Berra’s famous line about a restaurant -

:slight_smile:

And, if you can’t come up with a good cite for what I mentioned earlier, perhaps you can show that government programs have a better record than private charities in treating chronic alcoholism, which is one of the major causes of genuine homelessness.

Well, you interpreted the second phrase correctly as it applies to you, but it has nothing to do with the first.

Regards,
Shodan

43

Sounds to me like the War on Homelessness is just another theatre of operations for the War on Poverty. While we’re at it, it’s way past time to end the War on Drugs (which has only increased supply and demand for drugs exponentially and single-handedly created a culture of drug violence) and the War on Terror (which has only increased the number of terrorist attacks around the world and put civilians in mortal fear for their lives).

Not to mention fewer people stinking up the downtown cafes and asking for change on the downtown street corners, which seems to be what some people in this thread care most about.

44

[QUOTE=RedRosesForMe]
No, I haven’t made it my life’s work to help the homeless. But they are still people, and I help when I can. Fuck, what am I supposed to be doing so that the naysayers in this thread will acknowledge that I have, in fact, done something to help the homeless. Giving up my Saturdays when I was 15 isn’t enough? Do I have to single-handedly organize and fund my own fucking homeless shelter?
[/QUOTE]

Only one shelter? No dear, that would not be enough. You would need to single handedly organize and fund your own chain of shelters with enough space to take care of every homeless person in the entire world. Then fetch me a latte. After that we may consider allowing you to pit the government over this issue.

45

I guess you’re a believer in that old proverb: “You’re only a worthwhile person if your contributions to the needy are tax-deductible.”

46

[QUOTE=Shodan]
Well, you interpreted the second phrase correctly as it applies to you, but it has nothing to do with the first.

Regards,
Shodan
[/QUOTE]

Well, I can hardly claim disappointment in you when this IS what I’ve come to expect. How very Christian of you…

47

[QUOTE=Shodan]
I thought you meant it when you said this -
So, in this instance, you aren’t willing to do more than hand out stale, over-priced water. But, unless we are willing to throw lots more money at the problem, we lack “compassion”.
[/quote]

That was in response to someone who gave me a pat on the back for helping out with the protest, I was only saying that I hadn’t done much today besides give out some water I wasn’t going to drink.

Well, I’m a student struggling to pay my own bills. I don’t even have a Hamilton left over at the end of the month that I can give to a charitable cause. Besides, if I did have money I wanted to donate, I’d be limited to a couple of local charities whose scope is too small to be very effective.

I want better funding for large scale programs of the sort the protestors have tried to set up in the past but have been denied permits, harrassed, or shut down by the city. Those sorts of programs require lots of money. Some of the government’s current revinue needs to be set aside for them, or they need new taxes, or something, but it’s definitely NOT something lil old me can do myself.

It’s not a question of being forced to do something, it’s a question of where the money’s going. Sure, I can decide to take 2%* of every paycheck and give it to St. Vincent de Paul. So at the end of the year I might have given $300 bucks- not bad, for a student making less than 20K a year. OK, but that $300 isn’t enough to even cover a week’s worth of expenses at St. Vincent De Paul.

Now, if I could give that 2%, and others could give that 2%, to some third party with the resources to organize a large-scale, effective program, and to distribute the money, and to regulate the program, well, then I think we’d be a lot closer to solving this problem than if I just sent St. Vincent de Paul $5 a week.
*Randomly picked number.

48

What is the difference in your mind between a bunch of Catholics funding a shelter (with some non-Catholic support, of course) and the taxpayers doing so? Especially since Catholic Charities historically gets lots of block grant money from the government to do this kind of work?

Really, I won’t demand that you do more, but when you demand that we do more it is fair to ask what is being done now, and whether it is working. And I don’t think more money is necessarily the answer, frankly. There are systematic problems here that need to be addressed, as I mentioned above.

49

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
Fuck you, Lib. Like I said many years ago, if you want to argue against government and taxes generally, open a thread entitled “Government Is Evil” or “Repeal All Taxes,” and argue your POV.

For awhile, you’d gotten away from hijacking every damned thread you got into with your “Government and Taxation are Evil” arguments, but damned if you haven’t been back to your old tricks lately.

So shut up, fuck off, and let the grownups have an argument within the frame of reference of the U.S. as it is, rather than using every thread you join as a forum for making the same argument, over and over again, that gummint and taxes are inherently evil.

IOW, quit acting like a spoiled teenager who thinks everything should be about him.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, be nice. The person who raised the suggestion that taxes be used to cover government-mandated compassion was Kimstu.

50

I have heard many times that St. Petersburg is really an asshole to homeless people and charities.

That said, in my experience as a public librarian (up close and personal, trust me) there are two kinds of homeless people. There is acute homelessness, where you lose your house and you sleep in your car for a bit or crash on people’s floors, or you go to the shelter. You eventually get another job and haul yourself back up. These people often make very good use of services and such. These are the people I see for two weeks actually looking for jobs in the paper instead of sleeping near the classifieds.

Then there’s chronic homelessness. Every year when they do the big story on free Thanskgiving dinners I see people I know well, who if an apartment cost five bucks a year they’d blow it on booze instead. And the sob stories they’d tell you! Look, Rodney does not want to work. He does not want a hand up. He wants a handout, he wants a bottle of booze and a five dollar hooker, he wants to spend his days at the library and his nights at the shelter. You could hand him a job, you could hand him an apartment, and I hate to tell you this but it would be a waste.

IMHO, if you could do just one thing to really help people you’d bring back real mental health services. We used to have this woman we called Evil Hat Lady - we’d hide when we saw her because speaking to her was like putting your hand in a viper pit. Woman was vile. One day, she’s not wearing her hat, she’s… different. She actually apologized to one of my co-workers (never me - she always hated me most). Difference? She was getting the meds she needed. The woman has a job now, we hardly ever see her anymore! That is a program that works.

51

[QUOTE=Liberal]
Oh, be nice. The person who raised the suggestion that taxes be used to cover government-mandated compassion was Kimstu.
[/QUOTE]
Be nice to yourself up the ass with a nice piece of rebar, Lib.

You are making the same argument - opposing and ridiculing the idea that taxes should be collected in the U.S. under any circumstances - in every thread I’ve seen you in lately, regardless of the particulars of the discussion.

In those threads, and on this board, people other than you generally agree that government programs need to be paid for (which involves tax dollars), and while there are certain things they’d like to see their tax dollars go for, there are others that they’d rather not. Kimstu made her suggestion within that context, rather than with the intent of arguing the fundamental validity of taxation.

If you want to argue the fundamental validity of taxation, the grownup way to do it is to open up a thread on the subject. The spoiled-child way of doing it is to hijack every thread in sight where someone suggests funding X, Y, or Z with tax dollars.

As Feist says, you know who you are.

52

You had this question answered, not only before it was asked, but in the post directly above the one you asked it in. Since you’re apparently missing an “up” key, I’ll quote the relevant part for you:

53

[QUOTE=Zsofia]
IMHO, if you could do just one thing to really help people you’d bring back real mental health services.
[/QUOTE]

Thank you! Hopefully the rest of the No More Taxes crowd in this thread will actually pay attention to that now that you’ve said it. (Apparently, my post about the very same thing was in Chinese.)

54

[QUOTE=Zsofia]
Look, Rodney does not want to work. He does not want a hand up. He wants a handout, he wants a bottle of booze and a five dollar hooker, he wants to spend his days at the library and his nights at the shelter. You could hand him a job, you could hand him an apartment, and I hate to tell you this but it would be a waste.
[/QUOTE]
I’m sure there’s a lot of truth to that. But at the same time, I just don’t recall seeing nearly as much homelessness back in, say, the early 1970s, as we have during the past 25 years.

My WAG is that the increasing rarity of inexpensive housing (particularly SROs - single room occupancy housing) in most cities had a lot to do with that. There was a time when Rodney could have blown most of his money on booze and a cheap hooker, and still been able to afford to rent a room when it suited him.

Some 30+ years ago, I briefly rented a room in a dive in downtown Hartford for $17/week. Even a bum could usually scrape together $17 to keep a roof over his head for another week, simply because it wasn’t that far out of his reach.

And while Hartford may have been a less expensive town than many, the fact is that, back then, every city had marginal residential neighborhoods - neighborhoods that weren’t outright dangerous, but they were cheap because they weren’t particularly nice: you’d move out if you could.

But if you drastically reduce the quantity of such housing, and as a result, drastically increase the ratio of the cost of the available housing to the cost of a bottle of cheap wine, the bum is more likely to choose the wine.

This doesn’t eliminate the element of personal choice, but the larger environment often has a tremendous effect on the likelihood that people will make ‘good’ choices.

55

As I’ve noted (in Chinese), the funding cutoff for state mental hospitals during the Reagan era plays no small part, either.

Interesting stuff, though–I had no idea that you could do that in the 70s.

56

Well, I for one am certainly interested to see if Shodan returns now to enlighten us with exactly how to deal with the issue of homelessness…

…Or were you simply dropping by to very icily decry RedRosesForMe, and hopefully get her to be quiet hoping to prove she can’t “put up or shut up” as they say?

*edited for clarity of statement

57

Huh? Who says I won’t? Of course I will, and I do. But private charities simply don’t exist on the scale required to tackle all the issues involved in the nationwide problem of homelessness.

Moreover, I believe that caring for unfortunate people is part of our responsibility as citizens of our democracy, not just as private individuals with cash to donate to private charities. “Promoting the general welfare” by establishing and maintaining social safety nets is one of the things that our elected representatives, who are directly accountable to us, ought to be doing with their time and our money, in the public eye. I don’t approve of leaving that task entirely behind the closed doors of private foundation board rooms, no matter how noble and dedicated the boards of directors may be.

You mean, about the issue of what proportion of the homeless are children? Sorry, I thought that was just an attempt at a “gotcha”; I didn’t realize you were really interested in the question. Here is a 1999 Housing and Urban Development study on users of homeless services. Of the sample, 54% were currently homeless (defined as literally having no place to stay except shelter housing or a car or outdoor location or abandoned building, not just doubling up at the home of friends or family) at the time of the survey; another 22% had been homeless previously (the remainder were users of homeless services but had not themselves been homeless). And of the total sample, 23% were minor children, while 11% were parents living with minor children.

So minor children made up nearly one-quarter of all homeless services users surveyed. What I don’t know is how that proportion was distributed over the approximately half of service users who were currently literally homeless and the half who were not. Even if the proportion of currently literally homeless people who were minor children only amounted to one-eighth or one-tenth, though, I still think that’s too large to be called a mere insignificant leftover from “a vast majority” of homeless who are “100% responsible” for their own situation. I’d be curious to know how Crafter_Man would consider it, but he doesn’t seem to have returned to the thread.

:confused: This seems to me like a red herring. Even if private charities do do a better job overall than government programs in treating chronic alcoholism (and I certainly have no particular evidence that says they don’t), that doesn’t mean that private charities are adequate to cope with all the problems of homelessness on their own.

To make that assumption would be like saying “Well, my housekeeper did a fine job yesterday of putting out the brief fire on the stovetop when some spilled grease got into the gas burner, and she accomplished it much more quickly than it would have taken the fire department to get here. So from now on I’m going to give up supporting the fire department and rely on my housekeeper to take care of my firefighting needs.” Probably not a good idea.

Well, in modesty I have to admit that I didn’t think it up myself. :wink:

58

[QUOTE=RedRosesForMe]
I don’t doubt that’s true for many of the homeless, especially if they’re prone to addiction and mental illness.
[/QUOTE]
I’m prone to addiction and mental illness and have been treated it (and by some metrics, I’ve actually been homeless).

If you include depression and caffeine, I’d submit that most of the country is an addict or mentlly ill. I say that not to be flippant, but damn near everyone struggle with these issues to some extent. That extent varies quite a lot, but I submit everyone’s success or failure always contains some element of choice and responsibility. I submit your friend’s story is illustrative of that. He did eventually (your words) “climb out of the bottle.” Religion may have been an aid (it often is), but that religion is itself a choice.

The first step of AA is admitting powerlessness; but the irony is that one always has the power to admit that. Some choose not to.
As a practical matter, it’s my experience that programs that focus on the factors working against the homeless are far less effective than ones that focus on their capacity to change their own lives.

And this is an example: you focus on the fact that it’s three busrides and a long walk. One could just as easily focus on the fact that there* is* a program. (What, the homeless guy has something better to do than ride a bus the go for a long walk?) Yes it may be full – but I’d bet they have a waiting list. Again, do we focus on the obstacles or the opportunities?

Again, that’s not to say that in any given locality there may not be real value in making more government-funded shelters, programs, etc. There sometimes is, though I’d argue that they are ultimately only helpful to those who are already willing to do what is necessary to improve their lot. In my experience, they do little to change the minds of those who have not made that choice.

There is a real danger to painting the homeless as helpless victims who can do nothing to help themselves – the danger is that they start to believe it.

59

[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
What is the difference in your mind between a bunch of Catholics funding a shelter (with some non-Catholic support, of course) and the taxpayers doing so? Especially since Catholic Charities historically gets lots of block grant money from the government to do this kind of work?
[/QUOTE]
Not sure who you are addressing this question to, but I am going to jump in with my 2 cents. I personally believe, from my experience with private charities, that they are more efficient and more helpful to individuals than govenment-run social programs are. More importantly, they have a singular mission, which is not impeded by conflicting needs of other people. RedRoses’ example of St. Vincent de Paul vs. the city govenment is a great example…all St. Vincent wants to do is help the homeless. This is their mission, and they want to get it done with whatever resources they have. The government, on the other hand, has an obligation to the rest of the neighborhood, and the rest of the neighborhood are the people who vote. So if they don’t want St. Vincent de Paul to run a homeless shelter in their neighborhood, they make a stink about it, and the shelter gets run out of town. I see this happening in my own neighborhood with the SRO. There’s a good chance the facility is going to have to move, because they need to expand but don’t have the space. People in town are all up in arms about the possibility that it will have to close, but no one wants it to move to their neighborhood. And, because these people are influential, there’s a very good chance that it will close. There will be a lot of gnashing of teeth over it, and the local government will talk a good game, but they won’t take a stand on it because they all want the votes when it comes to election time.

60

[QUOTE=DanBlather]
I’m not sure why people who live, shop, and work downtown have to put up with the filth, crime, and constant begging that the homeless create.
[/QUOTE]

Because at least some homeless people are not stupid.

If you make your money by asking random people for it, you will want to be somewhere where there are a lot of people around. Some beggars do this by standing alongside busy streets with lots of car traffic, but that’s dangerous, and it’s easier for people to look away and ignore you while they’re in their cars. It’s easier and safer to make eye contact with pedestrians than with drivers, so a beggar would want to be in an area with lots of pedestrian traffic. Downtown areas have lots of pedestrian traffic.