I choose this one.
Will you please explain what is wrong with requiring certain things to receive those handouts? All the things I listed (Rehab, mental health care, job training/searches, not committing any crimes or infractions) are things that can help homeless people not be homeless. Why do you oppose requiring them in exchange for food, clothing, and shelter?
Nobody wants to punish anyone for being poor or homeless. Shitting, pissing, puking in public, trespassing, harassing people, prowling, theft? Hell yes I want people who do that punished, regardless of their social economic status.
you’re absolutely right. We should do much more of it. People should have access to those things (and more!) whether they’re homeless or not. Why tie those things to their homelessness or lack there of.
I thought those things were already illegal. How, again, does Prop B fix these problems?
And I’d be willing to wager a air amount of the after dark public drinking, pissing and puking is done by hard drinking college kids. Be sure to police them at least as stringently as you do the homeless. Dealing with the p.o.‘ed parents’ lawyers should be a learning experience for you. No selective enforcement, those heavy drinking college kids get mandatory rehab and hard core psych meds injected into them also, they have to be in for a 10pm curfew and sleep in a 100 bed barracks.
One of the most absurd claims you have made.
When people are living on the street, they do many of those problematic actions near where they are living. They use the corner of 1st and Main as a toilet because they are living at the corner of 1st and Main. And it’s at lots of corners, overpasses, right-of-ways, etc. With the problem so pervasive and spread out, it’s impossible to police it all along with the graffiti, theft, panhandling, etc.
One thing that eliminating camping does is make people look for alternate housing solutions themselves. Camping on the street is not necessarily a terrible way to live, so it likely is an attractive way of living for some people compared to their other options. If camping is outlawed, then they may instead live in less-desirable housing like motels, with friends, move in with family, live in cars, and find other alternate living solutions. I’m sure that some people will instead choose to live in hidden locations like in the woods or drainage ditches, but it’s unlikely that all the people camping would have to resort to that. And it sounds like Austin is looking at creating a remote site where people can live in tents if they prefer where there is support for them. It’s just that they won’t be able to put a tent anywhere they like in downtown anymore.
We write people up for public urination, underage consumption all the time. The difference is drunk bar patrons and college students aren’t setting up camp near business districts, aren’t routinely found sleeping in store vestibules and elevators, and they aren’t harassing people in public for money. And when they do go “home” they go somewhere they paid for or a family member or friend paid for. And some of the student housing around here does have rules about when people can come or go.
And spare me the threat about dealing with a lawyer of someone we wrote a P.U. Ticket to. You don’t really think that’s a thing, do you?
Actually, most don’t. Who maybe, but not many curfews.
… At almost all colleges and universities in the U.S., there are no curfews in the dorms . Entrance is often restricted to residents of the dorm and their guests, or to residents and other students at the university.
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https://www.quora.com › What-is-th…
What is the typical curfew for dorms at U.S. colleges? - Quora
And do those college underage drinkers and over-indulging bar patrons get the rest of the package you’re demanding? The 100 bunk barracks, curfew, mandatory rehab, forced medications (Antabuse, Haldol) ?
No, because they’re not homeless and not habitual offenders and most of what you listed doesn’t exist yet. Equating the occasional offender with the homeless is ridiculous.
And you need to look up the definition of “some”.
In many places vagrancy is.
But your common college drunk is not living on the street every day, causing a blight, begging for money, food, etc… and is not the one we’re trying to help here, are they?
But according to your ilk the only way to help the homeless is to give them everything with no effort on their behalf in exchange to try and help themselves using the resources given to them. Either that or insist that our entire society go through an evolutionary change for the benefit of a relatively small percentage of the populace that it simply isn’t going to go through.
Because the issue is not a city wide issue, it is state or nation wide. Reagan, while governor, closed nearly all the state mental health facilities, and just threw those people out on the street.
A city rarely has to budget to fix what the state or feds need to fix, some have gotten Federal funding and managed. And too often if a city does do a fix, other cities will just ship their homeless there. That is immoral.
And it is not just Democrats- Jacksonville FLA (14th largest) has a strong GOP mayor and a noted homeless issue. Same with Ft Worth, and Oklahoma City.
What works is spending up front capital and building homes. I am not talking spiffy 4 bdr ranch houses, but tiny homes, or homes made from shipping containers, or similar. In places that did that, it worked.
Columbus Ohio is noted as a city that has solved the problem, same with Salt Lake City, and Houston. All dem Mayors.
Columbus, Ohio and Salt Lake City, Utah
A couple American cities have implemented the ‘Housing First’ approach as well. These include Columbus, Ohio and Salt Lake City. Columbus has a 70 percent rate of successful housing results. Meanwhile, the state of Utah has seen a 91 percent drop in homelessness between 2005 and 2015.
HOUSTON — Nearly a decade ago, two U.S. cities with large homeless populations tried to solve their problem by adopting a strategy that prioritized giving people housing and help over temporary shelter.
But Houston and San Diego took fundamentally different approaches to implementing that strategy, known as Housing First. Houston revamped its entire system to get more people into housing quickly, and it cut homelessness by more than half. San Diego attempted a series of one-off projects but was unable to expand on the lessons learned and saw far fewer reductions in homelessness.
So “their way” does work, but it does require up front capital spending.
Note than none of the GOP run cities have apparently done jackshit towards solving the issue.
LA with Mayor Garcetti has started work on it.
Incidentally the idea that all the big Dem run cities have huge issues with riots and homeless is one of the Big Lies pushed by Fox and Conservative talk radio.
All those things need to be offered and there. But not required.
Sure if they commit crimes they go to jail, just like everyone else, so that is a “requirement”.
I think most of the general public would just be happy if the homeless were out of sight and out of mind. So it’s much more preferable for them to be sitting on their asses in shelters getting drunk and high than it is to see them doing the same thing in a public park. I don’t have a cite, but I remember watching something on television (before 2010 I think) about a shelter in NYC that experimented with allowing their residents to drink and it met with some success. The residents retained some control over their lives and seemed more willing to follow the other rules the shelter had. They were in a stable environment but still retained some control over their lives and some of them entered rehab programs and got jobs.
And how humane is that? Anyone that just wants that might as well embrace Kinisons solution of execution.
I want the homeless to become productive members of society with self destiny and dignity, and I’ll bet most homeless want that too. But they won’t accomplish that with just giving them some place to flop with no cooperation on their part to fight addiction and mental illness.
Very nice. But if you force someone into rehab before you they’re ready, you’re just setting them up for failure.
And if you’re giving someone a home, even a temporary one, they should be able to treat it as a home. Not feel like a prisoner. General rules, such as nothing illegal, and don’t be an ass, are for the safety of all involved and are generally the rules in any home. Requirements, such as, must go to rehab or psychotherapy, and must stay sober, are needlessly strict, and are often counterproductive.
That’s a nice sentiment overall mike and one I would generally support … but
There is a massive contradiction in those two requirements. Addicts are by and large incapable of not being asses. They can’t control their own behavior well enough to comply with “sensible” rules. AT least not consistently and reliably.
That is the circle-to-be-squared in all of mental health, of which homeless folks are but a partially overlapping subset. The thing that does the deciding about whether to participate in becoming fixed is the thing that needs fixing.
It’s more humane than just leaving them out in the streets, right? I’d like them to become productive members of society with self destiny and dignity as well. Perhaps providing them with their own place to live with access to alcohol when they want it would provide them with the stability to get their lives together.
We’re never going to be able to help everyone. If we provide them with housing, there will be those who just sit on their asses drinking and never make any effort to change. There will also be some who won’t be able to live in any housing we provide them because they won’t be able to follow the rules no matter how lax they are.
Solution for extreme alcoholic homeless people: A free ride and more booze.
I had to have a couple of drinks just to get through your post. 