When your policy is “I want the government to round people up and…” you’re not a liberal, you’re not a libertarian, you’re not a freedom lover. You’re a fascist…and…
I don’t support freedom up to the point where you get to shit on the ground and be an asshole to other people no. Call me a fascist for that if you want. It’s not OK.
The current situation is very different with most homeless people suffering from a combination of economic screwage and mental health screwage. Those are very different than people who have basically just decided to be assholes because they don’t want to cooperate at all with other humans. That’s not cool.
I suspect that if you fixed mental health and gave out enough UBI for people to be able to live a basic lifestyle you’d be left with substantially less than 5% of the existing homeless population.
If I end up being wrong about that I’m obviously open to reevaluating… but no I’m not going to let people build squatter camps in major cities on top of super expensive real estate just because they want to. That’s fucking crazy.
Try putting up public restrooms then. In the real world, no one lets these people use a bathroom. And it’s a lot cheaper (and better obviously) to just put up and clean some toilets than it is to throw people in prison.
They hassle people and act like assholes when you let them into your place of business dude. You’re acting like their freedom is more important than other people’s freedom. That’s not how freedom works. It’s freedom up until the point where your actions start to negatively impact other people. You have the right to live any life you want, right up until the point where you start causing major issues for others.
You don’t have a right to be an asshole. Homeless people are currently much more likely to be assholes than other random people. Often it’s the reason they are homeless. Not saying the don’t have valid reasons to act like assholes, but I want to get rid of those. If they keep being assholes after that point fuck 'em.
That’s almost entirely bullshit. Most homeless people try to be as hidden as possible and they just offend people by being dirty. If they actually do something that should be illegal, not just try to eat and sleep and poop in the best way they can, then handle that on an individual basis. But, that’s not what happens. People are arrested, rounded up, moved around, persecuted, and generally reviled because they are dirty and poor. If you don’t like where they poop, give them a toilet to poop in and make sure it works. Otherwise you move out of town, don’t hire some asshole with a gun to throw them out. It’s supposed to be a free country.
3 Likes
Can you explain what’s different between a homeless guy coming up to my table in Chipotle and asking me for some money as he walks out the door after using their bathroom, thus negatively impacting me, vs the guy at the table next to me taking loudly about how great Trump is and how immigrants are ruining America, thus negatively impacting me?
You literally want to throw one of these people in jail, and not the one who deserves it.
1 Like
Also WHAT?
Responding to everyone here:
I know my views here aren’t going to be popular but they come from my own (and my brothers) experiences riding public transport in major US cities from 6th grade through my early 20’s. I got hassled by homeless people in pretty aggressive ways at least once a week. I watched women get harassed pretty aggressively at least as often if not more so… often by homeless dudes. It happened to me and other people so often that I honestly can’t recall all the incidents because they all kind of blend together and it’s been 10+ years, but it happened a fuck ton.
Fast forward to today my wife works at an assisted living facility near a homeless camp, and she and her coworkers park in front of the facility to avoid being harassed by homeless people, which happens to someone at least once a week. Most of the people being hassled are minority women who work for <15 bucks an hour and the occasional nurse who makes more… but you guys can take your guilt about the existence of the problem somewhere else.
I want to eliminate homelessness as a problem. I’m not tolerant of the idea that we should make it more comfortable, I want to see it go away. Completely. I’m fine with giving them keys to places they can live and giving them money for food and other essentials. I’m fine with giving them treatment for their medical issues. I want them taken care of…
But this desire to make poverty more comfortable is one I don’t get. I don’t want anyone to be poor. I want everyone to have the bare essentials… so yes if I have my way it’s going to take some really aberrant super unsympathetic behavior to be homeless still.
And as for the Trump stain running their mouth in a coffee shop, I hate that guy too. I’d solve him by ruining Fox News’s business somehow.
We definitely shouldn’t put in plumbing and electricity and tolerating shanty towns popping up inside cities (the fire hazard problems alone… you guys really aren’t thinking though any of the unintended consequences and are happily representing everything wrong with big L Liberals). We need to help people be a part of society. Nobody gets to just opt out, and if they do we don’t need to be nice about it. There is a minimum line you must stay above in exchange for living in a society.
Are you imagining I’ve never met a homeless person?
What happens when women are harassed by construction workers? Do you try to lock up all construction workers everywhere?
3 Likes
If you want homeless people to not have comfort, fine. You don’t have to give them comfort. But, because I love freedom and I’m not a fascist, I don’t want it to be illegal for human beings to exist in public spaces even if their brain is in REM state and even if they don’t have nice clothes. If their freedom causes you problems, either help them or move away. That’s your freedom.
As long as they aren’t going so far as erecting permanent structures in public spaces it’s totally fine with me for them to be homeless as a choice… but assuming we’ve actually alleviated the reasons people are currently homeless I don’t see why they would still exist?
I think if construction workers are harassing women there should be consequences for that. I’ve never seen a construction worker harass anyone though. I don’t work in construction, so I haven’t had many opportunities to see it.
It’s not great advice that a single woman living on her own should take in a total male stranger for the night.
I’m not going to get into a pissing contest over who interacts with the homeless more regularly, but I take the bus every day from my house in East Baltimore to my office downtown that has probably 5 homeless guys who seemingly live on the sidewalk outside my building. They’re there every day, but maybe they go somewhere else to sleep. I’m not sure. There was a church a few blocks away that allowed homeless people to sleep on their grounds for decades, but they locked the gates a few weeks ago and have not reopened.
Anyway your attitude seems to be “these people are assholes, so they should be thrown in jail until they conform to how I think they should live their lives”. We can ignore the argument over whether homeless people panhandling in businesses or whatever are being assholes, because even if they were it is like legitimately fascistic that you think that is grounds for imprisoning them.
Consequences for the whole class of construction workers?
It really does not sound like that.
[ ] permanent structure
The discussion was about shelters who require their residents to be sober. I’m not advocating anyone take a stranger into their home.
1 Like
After we’ve fixed the problems that caused them to be homeless? Sure? Right now I’m super sympathetic to their plight. They are being forced to subsist in inhuman conditions either because of mental illness or because their skills and personalities don’t match well with the job market. Either way I think they deserve healthcare and UBI just for being part of the society…
AFTER we’ve provided those two things I’ll be way way less sympathetic. I think for obvious reasons.
Ok, I was over-grunching, apologies.
1 Like
I was homeless for 5 years total… Almost 2 spent on the streets in the UK & 1 year in a hostel for young folk and a temporary house for 2 years… That again I ended up homeless because I had a Homeless flat that was furnished with free electricity that cost nearly £800 a week from benifits…
When I got a job my support housing officer visited me & said I would have to pay it, I was confused as my job was selling news papers on the street for £105 per week… So I left that house with 2 months debt that my support housing officer put on.
I managed to get a run in gambling and went to get a bedsit and luckily never looked back… I stayed in a stairwell at that time for a week, got £700 and a bedsit.
My time on the streets and hostels scared me for life, it was eye opening, it doesn’t help that a person like myself is homeless in a messed up system.
My family thinks to this day that I’ve never been homeless and just stayed in hostels… I have a fairly OK family but because my mum was embarrassed by her and my dad’s perceived failures I could not ask a family member to put me up… My brother was also made homeless and he stayed in my grans for around 5 years.
If I ever told my story to my mother’s family they would disown her, my dad was alcoholic but got sober at the time and started his 12 step program on us, we were brought up on the streets and tough love was not the way with 2 teenagers suffering from years of abuse.
I’m stopping now… AMA & I will respond in time as its difficult to write down.
It’s took me all this time to say something, and still to this day affects me.
I knew more people from homes like mine who had been flung out because reasons (Usually Alcohol & Alpha males not wanting another strong male around) than homelessness through drug abuse or alcohol.
As someone mentioned up thread Most of the time it’s Homelessness-substances abuse-violence-jail.
My advice for peeps confused about this is listen to @microbet and listen carefully.
19 Likes
That’s a very moving account of what must have been a terrible period in your life.
The root causes of homelessness probably lie in the social and familial disintegration that’s become prevalent since the right came into the ascendancy 30+ years ago. I can clearly remember London of the 70s when the only homeless people were the relatively small number of tramps around Waterloo and Embankment. Now when I walk to work in central London I often pass homeless people, and the number of them is appalling.
1 Like
At the time yes, the worst is not being able to talk to folks at the time about it or even just talk in general with being all alone with nothing to see in the future but more of the same, it takes years to get over that aspect of being homeless.
I was lucky wrt being young and dumb and being able to survive without using Class A drugs or alcohol (I’ve never drank tbh).
Having to live underground in the city is difficult especially in our main 1s and being a teenager, as people notice and want to take advantage or lock you up, you have no friends and can trust no-one including social services as everyone thinks your just a wrong yin or done wrong to someone.
Getting a Job is impossible, and all the housing lists I was in was 5 years minimum and because of my age and gender, basically I was last in need officially.
Once I got into a hostel it was better wrt my health and help, the 1st night I went to bed at 5pm just to lie on it and woke up at like 11am the next day 
The hostels were dangerous as you had to get down and protect your social check when the postman arrived and dodge the robbers, then avoid them on the way to cash it + the drug dealers and money lenders who were the worst…
I was fortunate enough that I made some cash doing the fruit machines at the time alough it was the days of the Token Jackpots but I made enough to eat and live while in the hostels giving me time to be away all day from the day to day of hostel life.
And made some friends along the way, and went to the casino at the weekends as they were mobed with free coffee .
Before the hostel was difficult, some days I would get a bus to nowhere and sleep until I got flung off and then make my way back to the city
Then I would goto some derilict tenements etc and stay in the winter, build a small fire and chillout drying out clothes etc.
Having dry stuff was a problem and keeping clothes around was difficult, so when I came across an Asian laundry owner we had a deal once a week for dry clean clothes.
We got talking in the casino 1 night and he was a friend for years until he went back to Pakistan around 10 years ago. To this day I never knew his real name.
All I ask is for anyone reading my story is to never do a homeless guy a bad turn.
I realise the US is a different beast and it would be much worse to be in my position over there and for that I’m very thankful.
My problem was mental health from a young age of which I still have to manage as depression gets me, and I’ll take this moment to thank the posters from the old who helped me navigate the world better just by responding in a politics forum to each other, my reading of it help me greatly.
Tl:dr… Compassion helps the world be a better place… 
15 Likes