Everyone who has been a victim of violent crime is more likely to support police brutality? That seems like a tiny massive generalization.
By using right wing tropes about how more than a fraction of one percent of homeless people are homeless due to their own selfish “free-spiritedness” or nihilistic drug adventurism by bored kids with safety nets
2 Likes
The key to ending homelessness is to never allow any substantial discussion about the issue and attack every idea put forward as a right-wing trope.
1 Like
I think we should separate them into the people who legitimately want to get back on their feet and the people who are just working the system and getting high, and treat them accordingly.
Your response is ridiculous.
1 Like
Homelessness should be visible. I don’t know what the answer is, but I think the homeless should be where people can see them so they are forced to acknowledge the problem exists.
1 Like
At least half of the chronic homeless have significant mental health or substance use problems, and approximately one third have both a major mental illness and substance abuse.
Consequently, just given a homeless person a bed (or even their own apartment) won’t be the answer for a good chunk of this population,
1 Like
Well there’s your problem. You think people are saying “only give them housing.” It’s a comprehension problem on your end.
1 Like
I wouldn’t have imagined you being in favor of forced hospitalization and forced medications to treat the mentally ill. Because ultimately that is what society needs to do if it wants all chronically homeless people off of the streets.
Has the “problem” even been defined? What is homelessness?
You just did
2 Likes
It’s fascinating watching some reinvent the war on drugs. Not meant as a slight, just trying to engender some sympathy for past leaders who waged it
Other than forced hospitalization, incarceration or doing nothing, what are some ideas that have been suggested for dealing with homeless people with mental health or substance abuse problems who refuse treatment?
1 Like
What if, and hear me out now, we make sure that we take care of all of the ones who can be helped easily first, then we can work on helping the rest?
5 Likes
“Forced hospitalization” sounds ominous and oppressive, but in functional mental health systems that’s very much a part of the solution. When someone is a danger to themselves or others then they do get “forced” into the hospital. It’s an obligation that doctors and the legal system don’t take lightly. There are good and bad versions of this.
https://yssn.ca/understanding-involuntary-admissions-to-a-psychiatric-facility
This seems like the main idea:
Summary
I mean, if people aren’t supposed to care if others want to get high and live on the street, what else is there?
It probably isn’t best policy to put people in order like this. Governments tend to run out of money so putting the “easy” ones first is in practice going to result in the easy cases getting help and the difficult cases getting no help. That’s not totally unreasonable but it does seem to have the potential for discriminatory outcomes, like if the people with mental illness are the hardest to deal with then you’re putting them last in the priority list. My intuition is that it would make more organizational sense to organize categories of homelessness and have different approaches for different situations.
One area where good homelessness policy aligns somewhat to what you are saying is preventative policy. Like a small investment in helping people that are “at risk” (for example, someone that has received an eviction notice but hasn’t vacated their property yet) to head off a bigger problem down the road.
1 Like
It’s going to be massively politically unpopular stuff like these things:
I have no idea if that project worked out or not, but certainly in colder climates it makes sense to just provide basically safe places to sleep instead of having homeless people encamp under bridges and stuff like that. Not In My Back Yard, ldo, but somewhere else.
2 Likes
Yea I’m fine with that, I meant moreso let’s not let the problem of the harder cases being tough to figure out prevent us from starting to help in big ways altogether
2 Likes
That makes total sense. One very effective conservative head fake is to argue exactly what you oppose - they say that a policy that helps some people is bad because it doesn’t help these other people over here. It’s a way that they undermine good policy because they want no policy that helps other people.
That’s happening now in places like LA. People start in shelters, then they get vouchers to live in motels for a while, and help finding permanent housing, and then more rent help with that. LA’s mayor made solving the homeless problem his signature issue. SF of course has tons of programs too and has for a long time.
But the percentage people who successfully graduate out of the system is really really low so that it works out to $80k per verified success story or something like that.
The data provided by LAHSA showed that 31% of those leaving the shelters went back to the streets and 35% to unknown destinations. An additional 13% found other temporary housing, either with friends or family or in a program; 4% checked into a mental hospital, detox program or nursing facility; 2% went to jail; and seven — less than half a percent — died.
These programs seem to be helping some people, which is great. I’ll gladly put my tax dollars towards them. But they’re not putting a dent in the homeless population, which is always a stated goal used to sell the programs to voters.