The ethical issues here are different in warm weather cities then cold weather ones. In cold weather cities it seems ethical to me to force people indoors when it is freezing outside.
They should make homeless encampments be in the wealthiest areas and on elected official’s lawns, then I’ll bet we find a solution surprisingly quickly.
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I kinda see chronic homelessness (a subset of overall homelessness) a lot like gun violence in the USA.
We’ve had policies for a generation+ that have made this issue a clusterfuck, and undoing them is going to be a big challenge. Many chronically homeless have been screwed over royally by the system, and will resist fiercely any attempt of that same system to “help” them.
Similar to how the root cause of gun violence is a (very well-founded) distrust of the police combined with easy access to guns–both of which are extremely hard problems to fix, especially when a rabid voting base is hellbent on making the problems worse, rather than fixing them–the root cause of homelessness is tied up in things like the war on drugs and restrictions against formerly incarcerated people, inadequate/predatory mental health services, late stage capitalism issues, welfare reform and high housing prices, etc. Any one of these issues is super difficult to fix on its own, let alone all of them together, even if there was political will to do it which there isn’t.
So, yes, we’re reduced to “throwing” “these people” around to manage the symptoms.
(I’ve actually donated a lot to harm reduction, which has a very meaningful impact on improving the lives of people who are disproportionately likely to be homeless. However, it does nothing to address the encampment/trash issues, and quite possibly makes them worse by reducing the rate of disease and death among these populations. There’s a trolley problem that really encapsulates modern America.)
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i think a part of the solution could be areas where tents are allowed, and ideally where they are also next to services like hot water, toilet, laundry, medical aid, transportation. even if that is a temporary site. overhead shelters if weather isn’t suitable for tents (eg seattle in the winter).
plenty of homeless are in campers, seems like government could run rv parks, saving a ton of expenses on similar services and grief from suburban karens.
Does a camper even count as homeless? Plenty of campers are everywhere in LA - some in places where it’s legal to park overnight, some where it’s not but the cops look the other way. These are always in industrial areas or near wildlife preserves or something where there are no Karens to complain.
Camper people with a little money do stay in city-run RV parks around LA. Those are probably closer to the movie Nomad Land.
i suppose we could ask if #vanlife is homelessness or not. i think a person probably has a right to call themselves homeless or not in that case.
i stayed at an rv park once and was blown away (because i’m a privileged karen obv) to find out that a military family was living there while the dad is serving at a nearby base. the mom genuinely seemed to like homeschooling her kids in that environment for the summer months. they wouldn’t consider themselves homeless, but another person who got kicked out of their home and HAD to be at an rv park probably would.
In Temecula it’s legal to sleep in your car. So various parking lots fill up at night with people hanging out in lawn chairs outside their cars until it’s time to sleep.
The first time I saw it I was like what is going on here - are there going to be fireworks or something?
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Semi-permanent RV park situation != homeless
RV parked out on whatever road with no services until the authorities tell them to move along = homeless
…generally
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One problem might be attempting to apply a one-size-fits-all solution to solve the whole spectrum of reasons people become homeless:
- Severely mentally ill (no idea how to solve)
- Addicted to drugs, real desire to get clean (throw every resource possible at them)
- Addicted to drugs, zero desire to get clean (tough love might be better than enabling)
- Not on drugs or mentally ill, just extremely down on their luck (throw every resource possible at them)
- Street kid who would rather be homeless in LA than in an apartment in Cleveland (tough love might be better than enabling)
I would defer to the actual social worker we have here (forget the username) for my take on the above. This kind of nuanced approach obviously requires social workers to work closely with each individual to try to assess their situation. Blindly throwing money at the problem is a big factor at how we got into this mess imo.
I do think it’s unfair to only consider the needs the needs of the people who live in encampments in their neighborhoods, and not the local residents (who are always the working poor).
I posted this article a while back.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/rescuing-jessica-san-francisco-fentanyl-addiction/
I don’t believe the woman in this article is being helped by SF’s policies. She basically comes out and says she likes it in SF because they pay you enough to live and do drugs. I know that a lot of people think that’s the only humane approach. But can we at least admit it may be acting as a magnet that attracts more homelessness and drug addiction to the area? Again, I 100% defer to the local businessman who spends a big chunk of his time helping the homeless, but thinks the city’s blind bureaucratic approach generally isn’t helping.
I don’t have the citation handy, but I remember reading one study which claimed that at least 50% of chronically homeless people have either mental illness or severe substance abuse, and 30% are both severely mentally ill and addicted.
I don’t see any easy answers, although improving mental health services and having more psych beds that aren’t part of the correctional system would be a start.
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I also remember reading that in practically every state the majority of psych beds are located at the jails rather than at a hospital.
The solution to homelessness is to:
- End poverty in the US with UBI funded by taxing business/carbon.
- Provide free services at large scale in specific places.
We need to find the money through a combination of ending certain government programs (the entire current welfare system should probably just get bulldozed honestly… it’s rotten down to the foundations and built with terrible assumptions and goals. Obviously there’s a lot of Law Enforcement and Prison money to cut as well).
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Not that being in a hospital is a huge improvement, necessarily. A lot of mental hospitals basically function as for-profit jails, where they lock up patients as long as their Medicaid/insurance benefits allow them.
I believe there’s a lifetime maximum under Medicaid (180 days perhaps?) and after that the person is SOL. And the 180 days was really just spent incarcerated after a mentally ill person was shunted by the cops to one of these dismal places, offering little or no real help.
It’s great for Wall Street, though—the leading mental health hospital chain’s stock is doing great!
Re the drug abuse issues… give them free drugs and stop locking them up for doing drugs…
Give them free substance abuse counseling at the place where they get the free drugs too.
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Two cases involving homelessness I’ve read about in the last day are a mentally deranged guy pushing a woman in front of a subway in NY and a mentally deranged guy punching a 75 y/o former nurse (in LA, she hit her head and died). These are very much extreme cases, but there is some percent of homeless who are just too mentally ill or strung out to help themselves, and they will get a disproportionate share of the political attention. I don’t know what can be done about them.
that’s certainly cheaper than policing and dealing with burglary and petty theft damages
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Does the US not have maximum security mental health facilities? Ontario has one mental hospital that has a “forensic” mental health unit, which basically holds people that are dangerous but aren’t treated as criminals because they need health care, not prison.
The ex-military are hugely over represented among the homeless.
I liked the homeless much more than I liked the people trying to help them, paid and volunteers.
(I volunteered/interned at a shelter for a year during culinary school)
But we like our soldiers that don’t get captured!