Those seem pretty reasonable for a place to stay and 3 meals a day. Especially for someone who has few to no other options. There used to be an old saying about how beggars can’t be choosy.
But while you’re outside, act like a human being and don’t relieve yourself in public, don’t trespass, stay the hell out of stairwells and elevators, and knock off the aggressive pan handling. Just Because you’re too good to accept the standards at the shelter doesn’t give you the right to act like an animal towards the rest of us and then blame us for your choices and actions.
Most “adults” make better decisions in their life so they don’t have live on someone else’s dime.
But if life indeed dealt you a bad hand then what is wrong with someone housing you wanting things a Certain way? Whatever became of “my house my rules”? Then when you get on your feet you can do what you want in your own home.
What you’re demanding is “you are going to feed, clothe, and shelter me, but I will do whatever I want and will not follow your rules. Sounds like an insolent child. So much for your “adult”.
Sorry, let me be clear. Residents should not be involved in anything that would land them in jail, and they should not be a nuisance/disruptive. Drinking is legal, and if you can do it without being a problem for others, it is better than having you drunk on the street. Coming in at 2am should not be a problem, as long as you are not being noisy and waking everyone up. Beyond that, the rules become increasingly arbitrary.
I suspect that we may be imagining different settings. I am envisioning a place where each resident has their own room, as opposed to a big open space with scores of bunks. A place where people can stay for as long as they need to. And not a warehouse for crazy people, though if a person with mental issues can be a proper resident, that should be allowed.
And of course there is the objection to “drugs”, which is more of a problem caused by the stupid “war on drugs” that needs to end. If a resident is shooting up in the shelter, it seems to me that would be preferable to having to step over them doing that in the street. If they can be a non-disruptive junkie, why should that be a concern? (Dealing, of course, is another matter entirely.)
I live in suburbia. It is full of assholes, and there seems to be little or nothing I can do about. Those people earned their way here, but ogdammit, so did I. Why should I have to put up with their endless shit? And why should the situation be different in a place where we put the homeless? If we have to tread on their freedom because they have hit a rough patch, why not tread on everyone else as well?
Coming in at 2am from what? A job? Fine. Coming in at 2am after carousing the streets and being a nuisance? Not fine.
So you want to have a place where people can flop whenever they want, drink, do drugs, get three squares a day, and stay as long as they please? I hope you’re including premium cable TV with your homeless utopia. We don’t want to be cruel to them.
And all these goodies would be in exchange for what? Would you require them to go through drug/alcohol abuse rehab? Require mental health services? Require job searches and/or training?
I guess for me it would depend on whether the shelter is put in legal trouble by the federal government by openly allowing the use of illegal drugs. It’s less a moral issue than a practical one.
Or if it leads to repeated raids from the DEA or local law enforcement against residents that would also be negative.
Not really. Doesn’t even matter if drugs and alcohol are legal. If you’re staying on my property on my dime why don’t I get to set the parameters? Drug and alcohol abuse leads to violence, theft, etc… which are some reasons people are homeless in the first place and many of the problems ther shelters have and why they ban certain clientele.
But there seems to be a weird form of extorsion here: Feed, clothe, and shelter the homeless and let them do whatever they want at the shelter OR ELSE!
Or else they are going to wander the streets where they’ll defecate, urinate, and vomit in public, harass everyone they meet for money, trespass, steal, and cause a blight on otherwise decent communities. And meanwhile we’ll blame the productive citizens for this blight because they don’t want to pay to feed, cloth, and shelter the homeless in a place where they can do whatever they want and not be required to make any strides towards becoming a productive member of society.
No, I responded to exactly what you said. You repeatedly talked about incarceration, not treatment. Even now, your version of “treatment” is one where they can’t leave, so that’s still jail with extra steps.
Surely we all know the whole reason why those involuntary treatment centers were shut down. They didn’t really tend to treat the people in them. People would just be sedated or tied up. People would pretend to be sick as the only way to get in and test them, and then have trouble getting back out even though they clearly did not fit any of the criteria for a mental disorder.
So even your revised claim is just incarceration. It’s just even more expensive while repeating the old system that didn’t work back then, either. You complain about how existing ideas don’t work, but none of the ones that people say would actually work have been tried. Just the ones that make the non-homeless “feel” better.
Once again, Beau of the Fifth Column sums it up:
As for the rest of your comments, they’re the same type that treat the homeless as a THEM instead of an US. They create an outgroup so that you can then treat that outgroup differently. You make the proven false accusations that people are poor because of “bad choices,” when the reality is that we all are a product of our circumstances. We could all wind up homeless.
My tolerance for that sort of thing is below zero at this point. Homeless people are people. They are just like you or I. Same with poor people. Same with people of a different ethnicity or race. Same if they were born in a different country. Same if they have different sexual or gender preferences. And same if they have mental illnesses.
If you say that you can just incarcerate homeless people, there’s no moral argument for them not to just incarcerate us. Enforced incarceration is the real example of “first they came for ____.”
No, there’s nothing insane about trying something that could actually work, rather than getting hung up on moralistic concerns about how much they “deserve” help.
What is insane is to try and require homeless people to get their problems sorted before they are allowed to get shelter. It’s saying “don’t poop on the street” before there is anywhere else for them to go. It is saying “deal with your drug problem” before their life isn’t so fucked up that they need drugs to cope.
What is inhumane is involuntary incarceration, acting like you have to earn your constitutional freedoms. It is proposing solutions that led to inhumane treatment. And what’s insane about that is that it costs way more than the other proposed solutions.
Homeless people are people. You need to start thinking of them as people you care about, or even yourself. I know that, given my mental illness, if not for the helpfulness of my family, I would be homeless. It sounds like you need to figure out what things in your life could have gone wrong and left you without a home, too.
There is nothing unethical about insisting on drug/alcohol rehab, mental health treatment, job searches/training in exchange for food, clothing, and shelter. What would you have them do in a long term shelter? Get high, drunk, and just sit on their ass until they feel like wandering the streets for a bit? How on Earth does that help anyone? I want those homeless fellow citizens of mine to become productive members of society, to become well, to kick their addictions, to become self sufficient. You seem to just want to give them a place to flop while they continue being homeless forever.
It’s funny, almost all of Americas biggest cities are run by liberals, and many of those cities are in states run by liberals. So why do those locations tend to have the largest homeless populations? What are they doing wrong? What’s not working?
First they came for the winos, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a wino.
Then they came for the junkies, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a junkie.
Then they came for the guys who had vomited and pissed in the doorway , and I didn’t speak up because I had never vomited and pissed in a doorway…
Then they came for the guys who had passed out in the lobby of the public library and shit in their pants, and I didn’t speak up because I never shit my pants in the lobby of the library.
At some point, people who cannot live by the rules of society need to be forceable separated from society.
It should be a last resort, part of a long process with many warnings of progressively increasing severity, ,and supervised by the legal system.
But society is not well served by huge camps of homeless people who expect to remain there permanently.
A good start is to establish homeless shelters with lots of rules, and lots of help provided in teaching life skills. Those who refuse to learn will be removed
Because the homeless congregate in large cities. They always have.
It keeps them out of camps with disease, filth and high fire danger. It keeps them out of the ER. In the end it saves us money.
We failed them. We with closing all the mental health hospitals and wasting billions and billions on the endless and fruitless war on drugs failed them. The republicans caused this crisis.
There probably are a number of homeless people living in rural areas. A smallish number, most likely proportionally comparable to the number of non-homeless people living in rural areas. They will tend to be less noticed because camping is less strange out in the countryside, and surviving out there requires at least a little more raw skill than getting by in the city. Thus, the rural homeless are going to be much less likely to be mentally unstable.
Like yourself it is the left that blames the right for the plight of the homeless.
Yet in places dominated by the left the plight and the blight still exists. If they have the answers why in locations where they are in complete control why hasn’t the problem been solved?
I realize I have already answered this (their way doesn’t work), but I’d like to hear their answer to the same question.
The “left” itself does not exist in any meaningful way. Forty years of metastasizing reaganomics has removed any effects of “the left”. Cities may have “left-leaning” governments, but the cities are still essentially run by business, which is in no real way “left”. There may be good non-RW ideas put forth, but they rarely get past the words stage, and the “right” has louder words.
I think you’ve got the burden placed squarely in the wrong place, and that’s a huge part of the greater argument about the homeless.
It’s not the responsibility of the “normies” to improve the lot of the homeless in hopes that these people will behave themselves according to the rules of civilized society.
It may be in the “normies” self interest, but it’s not their responsibility. People should be expected not to shit on the sidewalk, or do all the other awful behaviors mentioned in the thread, and if they do, then the consequences are theirs to bear, not someone else’s fault for not making things easy for them.
Oh for Kripes sake. That’s your excuse? A man who has been out of office for 32 years and dead for 17 is preventing state and local governments from enacting your homeless panacea? Yet the ideas and programs that your side has tried have not in any way reduced the number of homeless, improved their lives, set them onto a course of normalcy, nor satisfied the productive members of our communities who are forced to accept and tolerate your failures.
Where is a place where “the left” has “complete control?” Austin is about as liberal a city as there is and the left most certainly does not have “complete control.” I submit the result of the Prop B election as my cite.
[Disclosure: I was born in and grew up in Austin. I got my bachelor’s degree in a city that is now, in many ways, a suburb of Austin. I now live in a town about an hour east of Austin. I have lived in Central Texas for most of my life and am quite familiar with its history, politics, geography, and culture.]
Homelessness is not a failure of the left or the right. It’s a failure of society as a whole. You point to big cities like Seattle and LA and say “these Left run places are horror shows because their way doesn’t work!” But you conveniently leave out places like Miami, and Phoenix, and Houston. If the Righties have it all figured out why is homelessness such a problem there, I ask? Because it’s not a political problem.
At least the Left is trying to solve the problem. Your “solutions” don’t do anything more than put a nice coat of paint on the problem. “Get 'em off the street!” " My sensibilities are offended by their presence!"
We need a major rethinking of how our society is run.
Unless and until there is financial security for everyone…
Unless and until people don’t have to choose between eating or getting health care or paying the rent…
Unless and until mental health is taken seriously…
Unless and until addiction is treated as a medical condition and not a crime…
Unless and until we, all of us, right, left or middle recognize that these are our family members and neighbors and have the right to be treated with diginity no matter what they’ve done, or how horrible they smell…
Unless and until we change how we look at one another, there will homeless.
Do you place any burden at all upon the homeless themselves? I agree that life handed many a bad hand, and nobody volunteers for mental illness. But for many more there were lifestyles and decisions that put them where they are. There was a downward slope that they caused. Many of them didn’t just wake up one day homeless. there was a path to it. Some gradual, some expedient.
How? By supplying food, clothing, and shelter with no restrictions nor perimeters and not requiring anything in exchange such as drug/alcohol rehab, mental health commitments or at least counseling and medication, job training/searches, etc… In other words a free ride with no cooperation from them to become productive members of our society? How is that a solution? I don’t have a problem providing these things temporarily, but there has to be a serious effort on their behalf to normalize in order to receive such benefits.
But few if any of these things existed before homelessness became the problem it is today. There have always been bums, tramps, hobos, transients, and whatever else they were called in the past in our country. Just to a far smaller degree.
What did change is the push to tolerate such behavior in our communities. And people will always get what they are willing to tolerate. Except many no longer want to tolerate it but then are accused of being selfish, hateful, at fault for the problem, and so on. And your solutions do not accomplish anything but give those that refuse to conform a free ride. A free ride with no effort at all to change. With no incentive to change many will live on that dole until it stops, then return to the streets. Where is the solution in that?
No.
About 10% of the population of the US resides at or below the poverty line. Another 15% existists just above.
Over 130 mil people (40%!) are struggling with medical debt, and about 40,000 of those file for bankruptcy every year based on that debt.
7% of the population was unemployed before the pandemic made things worse, and another 20% have to work 2 or more jobs to just be poor.
2.2 million are currently incarcerated.
And over 500,000 people are considered homeless.
When that many people find it that hard to participate in society, then it’s society thats to blame not the people.
That’s a good place to start. But that’s only a band-aid. We need real change
Yes. Because before we swept them away. Put them in jail, or asylums or slums. Treated them like animals, subhuman. And you want to go back to that.
Your way doesn’t fix the problem either. It just forces them somewhere else.
Your complaint is that these people are selfish, that they want something for nothing. Well, how selfish is it to want to punish these people because you don’t like how they act?
You’re right: giving handouts doesn’t fix anything. But, it’s a start.We start by being humane. By recognizing that these are people
It’s the Christian thing to do
It’s the Jewish thing to do
It’s the Islamic thing to do
It’s the (enter your religion of choice) thing to do
