If you’re trying to play “GOTCHA” on me, you should know my household is currently hosting a homeless young man. Telling that story in this thread would be a major hijack, but I might post it in MPSIMS.
There’s an excellent Star Trek: Deep Space Nine two part episode (“Past Tense”) with that very same theme. The crew of the Defiant are thrown back to 2024 Earth, where the unemployed and mentally ill are forced to live in ghettos called “Sanctuary Districts.”
Well guess what? Such camps in effect ALREADY EXIST. My plan would just be formalizing them.
BTW, the work projects you mention - back in the 30’s during the depression they actually DID have the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and WCA work camps/projects. Thousands of unemployed men were taken off the streets and given jobs to do. In the movie “The Grapes of Wrath” the Joad family stays in such a camp.
Look, nobody wants them living on the streets right? Its no good for them and no good for the general public. See how Los Angeles is already forced to provide some services like toilets and washing facilities. How is sending them to a camp much different than the government going in and providing services to those “camps” already? Is it worse than the government closing down a homeless camp, taking their belongings, and then just making them move and starting a new camp somewhere elselike they did in California?
YES, such “camps” already exist! But in a different form.
According thoTHISarticle, Seattle in effect, already created such “camps” by setting aside places for the homeless to settle or just allowing current ones to stay unmolested provided the people staying there abide by rules.
So why not just formalize this system and create camps where they can stay?
Oh, well, in that case it must be all right.
Can, or must?
NOBODY is in “prison”. People would be free to leave anytime they want.
At the same time nobody is allowed to sleep on anyones doorstep or set up a tent and camp in a cities parks or under bridges.
As I said above, the government already has to provide food, sanitation, and basic health services to the homeless. Why not put them in a place where this could be done easier?
Well my solution isnt perfect and hopefully in the long run society would create enough good jobs and affordable housing that such camps could be greatly reduced or eliminated.
In the meantime lets get these people off the streets where they are doing nobody any good.
I think this is a great plan and in fact, if the government would allow a voucher, say $400 a month, to ENCOURAGE families to take in a homeless person, that could help alot.
They already do this with the foster care system for children. So why not for the homeless?
I have been both that homeless person taken in, and the homeowner that took in another. In both circumstances I felt I came out ahead in the long run.
Your turn.
Well, hell, is providing toilets and washing facilities somehow worse than NOT providing them? Or do you prefer unwashed homeless? Seriously, you’re having a problem with providing toilets?
Because criminalizing being homeless and locking them up in prison camps is repugnant? People are free to either stay or leave in the present camps, would they be so in yours?
Another college student who was also temporarily homeless during the school’s summer intermission, used to hang out and talk. “It’s bad enough to have no place to go home to and have to figure out how to buy and prepare food cheaply with no kitchen and how to do laundry and where to sleep. But then to add insult to injury, there are all these people begrudging you the little that you manage to find. ‘No, you can’t sleep under these bushes, get along, you. Hey, you can’t change clothes in here, this is a bathroom!’ You know, if we’re rendered homeless it really makes no sense to treat us as if our homelessness is something awful that we’re doing to them!”
That, my cosmopolitan clodhopper, is exactly how you’re coming across.
As I said, yes, we would provide toilets, shower facilities, and places to wash clothes. It would be easier and more sanitary than just setting up porta potties wherever they just happen to set up camps.
And yes, people would be free to leave such camps. People would be encouraged though to find housing before they leave such as a person willing to take them in.
Wouldnt it be better to have a solid roof over their head where they could get services than have to live off of dumpster diving behind restaurants and living in a cardboard box?
Again, watch “The Grapes of Wrath”. In the 1930’s they had such camps for migrant and homeless families.
Which would be easier to convince taxpayers to fund: free housing for the homeless(at a time when people are finding it hard to keep up payments on their own homes), or public toilets throughout the town that are available to anybody? Your idea of building homes for them to live in may be technically better, but between getting people to pay for it and NIMBYism, it is probably a no-go realistically.
“Throughout the town”? As in, just anywhere? Everywhere? On every street corner?
Perhaps we should be a little more organized about this. Pick the places where we want the homeless to congregate, and put the public washrooms there.
I propose residential neighborhoods.
Never said it would be easy. A homeless camp would not be the same as a free apartment downtown. A large camp on the edge of town in nobodys backyard would be easier than setting up in a residential area.
Thing is you, me, and everyone else has the right to walk down a sidewalk, thru a park, or bicycle on a trail without seeing homeless campseverywhere.
Such is available in SF and probably most other places. But “safe” also implies safety FROM the newly housed, and almost all prefer the street to societal norms.
Few of our homeless are down on their luck. Most are addicted- and how did they become addicted?- and/ or mentally ill, an housing them will not solve that. Many are able to work, but they may not need to because panhandling is lucrative. And general assistance money goes far when you choose to live in a tent. And steal electricity from a light pole. And steal aluminum from public piers. And copper from wherever you can steal it. And manhole covers.
Few want their lives put back in order by us. I have run out of sympathy. But if your heartstrings are still manipulated by those you see, get involved with trying to help them, don’t wonder why noone else appears to.
We do? where is that written down? And here I thought we had we had an ethical responsibility to help those in need.
My problem with homeless camps is that they’re unlikely to be given the same level of societal maintenance that other areas get - by which I mean a police presence that doesn’t assume the residents are all criminals who deserve to be robbed, raped, and murdered.
Well, that and that they’re just a transparent effort to throw the garbage people away in the garbage.
Since when? Where is that right enumerated?
It would also be far away for the jobs they need to escape, and the help they need to survive. Besides, they would only get to stay there until the city expands-then the suburbs and industrial areas force them farther out and farther away from the jobs and the help.
That’s not what you said earlier:
That’s right: Let’s round them up and keep them away from where the jobs are until they can get a job.