Why are people still homeless?

Great Debates
21

So not contributing to society can only be measured on a fiscal basis? Stay-at-home moms - they’re doing a job, one of care, whether or not they are monetarily rewarded for it. How about someone who is not working, does not have children, but is the central support figure for a large group of friends/a church/the rest of their family? Contribution can be made in so many ways. One of the women at our shelter is a ‘street mother’ who cares and looks out for her kids, giving them advice from a life of experience no professional could hope to match. But she’s not working and is a drain on tax payers. She is unable to help herself, but has been central in helping literally hundreds of kids evade the usual traps that come with youth homelessness (drug addiction, prostitution, violence) until they’ve been safely rehoused. Is her contribution to society invalid?

**
This assumes the person is of fit mental and physical health to make these decisions. Very few of the people I have met choose not to work because they are merely lazy. In fact, I would say none. They have mental health issues, or are not dealing in any meaningful manner with their own problems… for whatever reason, they don’t believe they are able or worthy to be more than they are, a ‘waste of space’. I know I’d rather be slogging my guts out than sat around all day feeling utterly useless to everyone including myself. Few ‘choose’ this option.

**
I am honestly not trying to pick you out here, it’s just this is a pet topic for me and your views seem to be pretty much diametrically opposed to my own. I would support higher taxes or state-controlled charitable contributions, but I am sure the money wouldn’t go to anywhere I’d want it to. If it was up to me, I’d want a monthly means-tested contribution from every single wage packet in the country going towards charitable work. Force people to give, but no more than they could personally afford. The cost of a new shirt, or their lunch for a day. However, that’s not my most popular idea :wink:

**
Doesn’t sound like much fun, no. But do you truly, honestly think that the majority of homeless persons either rough-sleeping or in shelters; pan-handling or going through trash for their meals; desperately searching for the means to feed an addiction if they have one; constantly in danger; humiliated by the disgusted looks of their fellow humans who are lucky enough to enjoy a normal life; are enjoying themselves?? A day or a week of nothing to do but exist sounds like fun. A lifetime of no self-worth, threat of disease and violence, and the utter lack of respect as a human being, isn’t much fun at all.

Depends if you care. I care, so I give what I can afford, regularly. I don’t expect others to give what I do, but I do expect people to make an educated decision not to give after considering the multitudes of reasons for homelessness, rather than choosing not to out of a kneejerk reaction in anger that people are somehow getting an easy ride. It’s not easy. I’ve been there myself, and now see it everyday.

22

Maybe nobody “wants” to be homeless, but the gradations between lazy parasite and helpless victim are not as clear as they are presented as being by either side of the debate on the poor.

Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

Maybe you would like a reasonable place to live. Do you want it more than you want crack or Mad Dog 20/20?

Maybe we would like you to have a reasonable place to live. Do we want it badly enough that we are willing to force you to stay on Haldol or thorazine or lithium? Badly enough that when you finish your thirty days, and your lawyer has you cleaned up enough to be presentable at the hearing, that we as a society are willing to compell you to take the medicine that you are convinced is a plot to poison you? Even when the Legal Aid Society lawyer makes loud noises about less intrusive options that everybody knows aren’t going to happen, and wouldn’t work if they did?

Sure, you are waiting at the on ramp of the freeway with a sign saying “Homeless Veteran - Will Work for Food”. But it is a different on ramp every other week or so, and you always seem to be wearing different clothes. Are you a victim, a scam artist, or something of both?

To say “all they need is a lot more social spending” is as naive as “they will only drink if you give them money”.

Regards,
Shodan

23

ixnay the forced shrinky shit.

There’s a difference between “lots of homeless people are homeless because they are lazy (they could get a job just like ‘that’ if they wanted to but they don’t want to)” and “lots of homeless people are homeless because they have bad habits and the absence of good habits and unless those factors change they ain’t gonna become employable”.

I would agree with the second statement. I did know some homeless people who could never see beyond the next loaded crack pipe or 40 ounce. I knew many who would not be able to prepare themselves (appearance-wise and attitude-wise and behavior-wise) for an interview even if you promised them 10 times their weight in cocaine immediately upon successful completion of said interview.

It is also simultaneously true that if you dropped a person with 8 years’ CIO experience and an MBA from Harvard and fluency in 7 languages into a situation where he had no helpful contacts or liaisons, no money, no home, no job, and no immediate place or person to go to to obtain those things, this person would be unemployed and homeless for awhile. And it would not be true that this person can “get a job just like that if he wanted to”. Eventually, yes. This person has all the right habits, the credentials, the little mannerisms that convey social appropriateness, the knowledge of what you have to pull together to pull off an interview.

If homeless people were homeless because they were lazy (in any meaningful proportion), we would expect to find their presence an historical constant. Instead what we find is that homeless people appear in times and places where economic circumstances are bad, then fade out when times get better. In the US, we had homeless people in the depression and then very few of them (even the alcoholic bums had rooms to rent) for a few decades, then homeless people again beginning around 1980.

24

I’ll take a stab at the “How much should we spend on the homeless?” from a theoretical economic standpoint (“theoretical” meaning that I don’t have any number in front of me, so I’ll be speaking in generalizations).

As you give money to the homeless (via social programs), you’re going to be removing money from the free market. This is going to, like it or not, decrease economic growth. Decreasing economic growth will lead to a less healthy economy, which will in turn decrease employment, and this will result in some additional homelessness. The question we need to ask is, “Is the number of instances of homelessness we’re curing with these social programs less than or greater than the number of instances of homelessness we’re causing by reducing economic growth?”

There’s a couple of extremes we should address here. One is the hardcore libertarian “screw 'em all” extreme, in which we do nothing. The other is pure communism - everyone gets exactly the same, divvied up by the government. The latter obviously doesn’t work well in practice, but I’m not sure what “homelessness” looked like in, say, communist USSR during the cold war. I know that living conditions certainly sucked, but did everybody have a home? I honestly don’t know the answer here, so I’ll address both scenarios.

Scenario 1: Communism leads to 0% homelessness.

Okay, so somewhere between our extremes, we have a point at which everyone has a home. If this point lies close enough to the libertarian end, then it may well be possible that we can give everyone a home and still have decent living standards. More likely, if Scenario 1 is valid, the point lies closer to the communist end of the scale. In this case, we have a trade-off to make. How far are we willing to sink our overall living conditions in order to guarantee 0% homelessness? Personally, I think that if everyone has a home, but everyone’s miserable, we’re worse off than if 90% of people have a home, and are happy, and 10% are homeless. YMMV.
Scenario 2: Communism leads to greater homelessness than what we have now.

In this case, there must exist a point at which if we can minimize homelessness by giving X dollars to social programs that target homelessness. X may very well be zero - ie, the extreme libertarian approach is the best way to go. We need to look at historical data and try to figure out whether it looks like more or less government involvement is the way to go.
I suppose there’s also a Scenario 3, in which the closer we get to communism, the lower homelessness gets, but it never reaches zero. This case pretty much fits in with Scenario 1 above, though.

Okay, I guess this isn’t really an answer, so much as a description of how one would go about finding the answer. But it’s been a long day, and that’s the best I can muster at the moment. :slight_smile:

Jeff

25

I keep telling people to build suicide machines in every city. That will solve a vast majority of the problems in America. If you’re going to hold on to 1/100 of the worlds GDP as a single individual; you should certainly spend money on suicide machines for the general public. I’d imagine a 10% turn-over rate within the first 5 years; then you’d have a leftover population that is suitable to slavery.

-Justhink

26

I am not an economist, but could you be kind enough to back up this statement? Giving money to social programs (as far as I know) will not have this effect. Consider the following:
[ul]
[li]Money that is given as direct benefits (i.e. a welfare check that is cashed) gets spent on goods and services.[/li][li]Indirect benefits (such as shelters, food stamps and the like) are always administered by some bureaucracy. This creates jobs, the wages from which are spent on goods and services.[/li][/ul]
All of which will have the effect of stimulating the economy. That said, I do understand that if money is diverted from my paycheck, I will have less to spend to stimulate the economy, but there are a couple of factors that I think mitigate this.

First is the fact that I (and many folks like me) would fall in to the category of the so-called working poor. What this means is that the money that I spend is all mandatory (food, shelter and the like). It is not as if I can choose to spend less money that I do now.

Second, I think that this comes out in the wash. I spend a little less; the person that is benefiting from my labor spends a little more.

Finally, Justhink, can you please verify that the following statement is some sort of a weird joke that I am just not getting? Otherwise I fear that I may be sick.

27

If we are to put money into social programs, they should be effective ones.

Certainly I doubt that anyone would argue that the money we put into education is wasted money, or that it hurts the economy to divert money in this fashion.

If social programs for homeless people result in formerly homeless people contributing and participating in the workforce, this is a good thing for both the homeless people and the economy.

If they mainly only result in full-time jobs for social workers and baseline subsistence for homeless people who remain homeless aside from the social program’s cots – well, speaking as a former social worker AND a former homeless person, I have to say this disgusts me.

28

That really depends on what’s being done with the social spending. I honestly have no clue about homeless support systems in the US further than that which AHunter3 has posted about; they so

29

The hell? I was previewing! Heesh. Anyway…

That really depends on what’s being done with the social spending. I honestly have no clue about homeless support systems in the US further than that which AHunter3 has posted about; they sound very different as here most projects will provide a private, lockable room with a contract between the project and resident that functions as a legal tenancy (generally it will only be temporary projects, such as winter shelters for the newly homeless, who provide anything even nearing a cot, and a team of workers will do their utmost to ensure it’s no more than an overnight solution). But in this country, funding or the lack of, is very much the primary problem in keeping effective support programs running. Sure, it takes money to provide a bed for a night. It takes a lot more money to provide daily visits from a mental health worker or an on-site medical team; resources for the keyworkers identifying the client’s specialised needs and beginning to address them; continuing support once the client has moved into private accomodation and the work sector; long-term detox and rehab programs which, when highly funded and resourced, have a high success rate in terms of clients becoming long-term clean. Only with the resources to train and employ illiteracy workers, outreach teams, specialist legal advisors and advocates, abuse-support counsellors etc, can the industry as a whole hope to sustain any kind of lasting support for the people it works with. Increased public spending and charitable funds are our only source of income. We need more.

30

The cruel but inevitable question: Cite?

I asked this some time ago on the SDMB. What programs for sobriety “work”, and why is it so hard to find out?

My impression is that AA works occasionally, and nothing else works any better. I have heard lots of claims from lots of groups, and the more I look, the less the results hold up.

So I will ask you: what evidence is there that more spending will == more sober people and less homelessness? UK or US is fine with me.

Regards,
Shodan

31

How so? When you give money to the homeless, you’re not removing it from the free market. What do you think homeless people will do with this money? Yes, right, they’re going to spend it in the “free market” . Your premise just doesn’t make sense.

32

Well, there’s those homeless people you hear about every once in a while that have millions of dollars squirreled away somewhere. Don’t give them money.

33

I can’t provide a cite for more money = less homelessness as the problem is, and may always be, an ongoing one which comes under various influences. For example, British projects are currently struggling to provide shelter and support for a growing immigrant and refugee population, so the industry is only just beginning to research how best to keywork a different kind of homeless person than it was prepared for. A slump in the country’s economy can initiate a countrywide recession, making those cities most at risk of resulting high unemployment more likely to see a rise in homelessness/substance abuse problems; the process of support is an ongoing, organic one. However, more money can provide much needed research into the efficacy of various types of support or treatments, and then the resources for those support systems that are able to maintain a high success rate.

I’ll admit, I’ve found it difficult to find anything online. I’m at work this afternoon and will have a look for literature on rehab efficacy statistics if I am able. In the meantime -

http://www.globalchange.com/drugs/TAD-Chapter%209.htm#Treatment gets results

http://www.globalchange.com/drugs/TAD-Chapter%209.htm#Track record

Looking at the websites of actual residential rehab programs, I could only find statements along the lines of

(from here) without any cite for the studies they’re refering to.