When I was 16, I had an incredible work opportunity that involved people who’d been long-term patients at a state psych hospital in Elgin, Illinois. They lived in dread of ever getting sent back, and when I toured it, I understood why. However, I was appalled when Illinois, like so many other states, essentially emptied such hospitals: the plan was so obviously half-assed, short-sighted, irresponsible, and focused solely on saving money short-term. Community mental health centers were supposed to assume oversight, yet there was no funding. Gee, guess what happened.
Then Vietnam veterans started returning in droves, many of them with mental health issues directly related to their service, and we–the collective we–turned our backs on them, too, and didn’t provide adequate mental health care… Tens of thousands of them were not able to function and became homeless. Nor did we learn from this and provide adequate mental health care for veterans of subsequent wars.
It’s so much harder and pricier to deal with the consequences than it is to preempt them, yet we don’t. We suck at that. As I noted earlier, the biggest segment of the homeless are people who can’t find affordable housing. I guess we could shrug and say, “You should’ve made smarter choices when you were too young to know better” or “Too bad for you that you that you didn’t have a higher IQ or that you didn’t get yourself born to different parents,” but that does nothing to resolve the problem.
We can continue to chase the problem and the attendant costs or try to move ahead of it. Guess which one we’re apt to do.
Agreed. And your opponents in this thread are simply enabling people which is the worst possible thing you can do. We are accused of not having compassion, but giving a guy a place where he can flop after he pisses all over the floor seems like compassion, but it isn’t. You are keeping him in that dependent state, but allowing him to do it more comfortably which gives him less incentive to change.
And there is the basic fairness. I got up this morning, got dressed, and am walking down the sidewalk to my work. I don’t want to step in this guy’s feces or over his tent while doing it. Life’s tough pal, but I’m dealing with it and you have to as well. If you need some help, here is a hand, here is money for a meal, but bottom line is that I’m not stepping in your literal shit anymore.
(Taking one for the team.)
I’ll be the first(?) to say I fully support the homeless pissing all over whatever floor they choose . . . who else is with me?
While there isn’t much we can do about a dog urinating, if you let your dog defecate anywhere but your own property and don’t pick it up, you’re getting your picture taken and shamed. I think j we can hold the homeless to higher standards than dogs
If you (any you, but @crowmanyclouds has volunteered to be first) want to give the hard core addicted / mentally deranged homeless the right to piss anywhere, please adopt one into your home and let the piss fly where it may.
My overall take:
We are a community. We all owe something to everyone else. But we don’t owe everything to everyone else. From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs is a fine sentiment I wholeheartedly embrace. But does need guardrails on both sides of the equation.
Why guardrails? Because human nature is a cast iron bitch. Some of us could live harmoniously in a communitarian Paradise. Others could live equally harmoniously in a libertarian / Randian “every man for himself” Paradise.
But the vast majority of humans would flunk either of those tests, leaving them (and the rest of us) in something between the flawed-but-trying societies we have, and a Somalian / Hobbesian anarchic State of Nature celebrating all the worst of humans’ collective propensities to selfishness, violence, and short-sighted thoughtlessness.
At this point all we’re really debating is exactly where to place the guardrails. “Nowhere” is a fool’s answer.
Kindly don’t characterize everyone who sees who pkbites’ unrealistic lock-em-up solution as “enabling” people to urinate wherever they flop. Look, you want to lock up the homeless–which was pkbites’ proposal-- you go right ahead. You’re OK with the huge increase in taxes to fund this, right? And they will be enormous. Jailing people means keeping the working homeless from their jobs, but that’s not encouraging dependence, right?
You want to force the mentally ill into therapy–also PKB’s suggestion–be my guest. First you’ll have to change the commitment laws, as they severely limit the length of time someone can be committed. Then you’re going to have to pay the insane increase in taxes to foot the bill–you’re OK with that, too, I take it–AND it’s not going to work because-forcing people who don’t believe they have an issue into a psych ward is not going to magically cure them. Forcing medications–another law that would have to get changed–will only work while they’re forced and when the mental health issue is treatable. Or were you thinking of committing all of the mentally ill for life? Because that’s realistic and cost-effective. It was the high costs of lifetime commitment that led Gov. Reagan, et al to empty state psych hospitals in the first place.
And after you do all that, you’re STILL going to have the majority of the homeless population because the #1 culprit is the lack of affordable housing.
I live in a city in which the homeless population has exploded over the last several years. While we have very little urination/defecation on the sidewalks, homelessness is nonetheless a huge issue. Just because I don’t believe in unrealistic, ungodly expensive non-solutions doesn’t mean i want to “enable” people. it means I want realistic solutions to a problem that impacts not only the homeless but the rest of the population as well. Feel free to join me.
If urination/defecation on the sidewalks is such a huge problem maybe we should asking why the homeless, as well as the rest of us, can’t find a public restroom.
A key point that has been made several times in the thread (most often and most ably by @nelliebly) is that we (society as a whole) don’t have one problem called “the homeless”. Instead we have several very distinct problems that all result in the same high-level symptom: homelessness. Plus of course each of those problems has their own separate constellation of other symptoms. And their own separate constellation of causes.
If we fix the cost of housing (or the wages of low wage workers) in high cost areas, that moves one population off the streets.
If we have UHC, that moves a different population off the streets.
if we have adequate UBI, or better unemployment benefits and job security and less black market below min-wage work, that moves yet another population off the streets.
Those 3 things would each probably turn a profit across an actual omniscient accounting of the true costs and benefits to everyone.
Then what’s left are the mentally disturbed, the too-mentally-handicapped-to-work, and the hopelessly addicted. The folks who, by and large, can’t / won’t be able to help themselves no matter which resources are aimed at them.
But “just” fixing the first 3 would go a long way to reducing the problem from “exploding out of control in many cities” to “a minor irritant”. While also eliminating a monstrous human cost to the vast number of people whose lives we recover.
The ones here, the real homeless who are living in the desert and just about as sane as a junkyard dog.
There are a lot of squatters here, they like to move into snowbird’s homes for months on end and they can be pretty random as well. Some, not all seem to be fairly sane, others do things like paint the windows blue to keep out the haunts. (This might keep the haunts out, but did alert the neighbors to call the police.)
It was the high costs of lifetime commitment that led Gov. Reagan, et al to empty state psych hospitals in the first place.