this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Housing Bubble 2: Return of the Ugly
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I say this as someone who fully supports my tax dollars going to help fund services for the homeless:
At least where I live, homeless people are a menace. They treat the neighborhood like a giant trash bin (and I mean that literally), are verbally and sometimes physically confrontative with residents, and generally respect the area as little as they respect themselves. Until I bought a condo here I never felt the need to carry a weapon, but now I do, after having had some scary brushes with our local homeless.
They make it very hard for people to want to support them.
That said, I'd still much rather see our public funds go to provide housing and mental health facilities for them rather than fund a new stadium or some other dumbass billionaire bullshit. The added bonus is that providing for the homeless costs much less than enforcement.
I sympathize with your view. We can I understand that their situation is a result of conscious policies and not their own moral failings while also expressing frustration at the heavy imposition their neglect imposes on families and neighbors that also had nothing to do with their situation.
Liberals love to mythologize the unhoused suffering as some noble burden to deflect from the gross injustice that it is.
But if you think about it, those people didn't magically appear there. They came from somewhere before being homeless....they came from homes. Those people are sometimes drunk or drugged and pissed at the same time. Because they used to have a house. It could have been your neighbor at some point. You could be homeless one day. Our system allows that and works towards that...a revolving door between the haves and the have nots...but it's a one way churning door. You know get to go towards haves not.
The state spends tons more money on making it harder for these people than it does on making them easier. If that reversed, this would not be an issue.
Yup.
We Americans love our law code to reflect our cruelty, and in the case of homeless people, we pay more for it sadly.
Prisons are designed, outside the scope of entrapment, to house, clothe, and feed a dense resident population. The resources spent on security could easily be diverted to quality of life improvements.
The organizations that run private prisons off tax subsidies could easily be retooled, in part, to the logistical administration of homeless shelters. They already have on-site detox programs.
You could even retool the current exploitative work programs into trade training.
It's possible there are more around that you can't see. I check out r/homeless subreddit occasionally, and the people there say that the obvious, mess-making and rude homeless population gives the rest a bad name. Many unhoused people choose to stay out of sight, stash their belongings somewhere and then clean themselves up when going out and about. Many even have jobs.
And yeah, more funds should go towards getting housing and other help to all homeless people, regardless of who they are and how they act.
That's the difference between facing a problem in real life, versus discussing a problem in the abstract online. The ugly truth of the situation is quite often a lot more difficult to face IRL than it is from the comfort of our couches. It's easy to say "defund the police", it's quite another thing to face the mentally ill who refuse all of the services offered after defending the police, who desire nothing more than to shit on the sidewalk in front of your condo, and yell at the street signs all day.
You think more money for cops is going to solve homelessness?
Absolutely not.
Louder! I often get the impression that most people have never had to actually deal with the homeless, and I don't mean passing them on the street.
When I worked downtown I was constantly on guard. About got into a fist fight 3 times. Downtown is one of the rare places I always carry a gun.
Mostly, people are homeless because they can't handle the bare minimum of living in society. Of course there are all the exceptions we care to being up, but they almost all have one more more of these qualities: antisocial, aggressive, substance abuse problems, mental problems, or are flat out too stupid.
So what do we do with such people? It's a sticky problem. Seems we could go a long way by simply housing them and giving them money. That easily gives the hard luck cases the boost they need. But others are always going to be a problem.
It's solvable, and we've seen Finland do it. There are only roughly 1,000 willfully homeless people in all of Finland, and there will always be a small sliver of them anywhere, because some people are nomadic by nature.
Two independent studies in California both found around 70% of unhoused were productive members of society before accident or illness caused them to lose their job, insurance and home. Structural impediments prevent the unhoused from getting back into employment and housing. In majority of cases substance abuse came as a response to their situation, not as the cause.