Right. So of course we're supposed to solve homelessness. Know how this can be accomplished in Seattle?

Seattle needs a great deal more housing.

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/seattle-sta...

The US needs to provide a national health care system. Our current system is actively part of the problem.

Homeless services need to do a better job of providing "opportunity," not just charity. Most homeless services actively help keep the problem alive, a la The Shirky Principle.

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/08/give-man-fi...

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-shirky-...

Lot of the homeless services do offer job training. Goodwill is all about job training and Salvation Army also offers job experience for people recovering from addictions. Issue with homeless is a lot more complicated than access to jobs.

I once qualified for assistance with job hunting based on my handicap. Thankfully, I was offered a corporate job making better than minimum wage about the time I completed the lengthy intake process or they would have had me permanently underemployed and destitute instead merely trapped in poverty for a decade or more.

Please note that I spoke of opportunity, not jobs nor jobs training programs. Lots of job training programs et al actively limit opportunity. They don't want their participants to get too uppity or ambitious.

You don’t need to solve all of homelessness, just providing something competitive with a bus could be a start one would think.

Seattle has tried that.

People with chemical addictions will not go to shelters because shelters don't allow you to be drunk or high.

So shelter beds go unused, and people shoot up and drink in parks, on sidewalks, and on busses.

> So shelter beds go unused

Shelter bed usage in Seattle runs at 90% as of last year, with low reported use rate before that being an artifact of bad reporting rather than reflecting actual conditions [1].

[1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/qa-with-p...

If true, then there is something wrong with the policy that all shelters need to be sober. Introduce some number of shelters—in parts of the city where high drug usage is a problem—that include safe use spaces (i.e. with medical access, clean needles and dispose boxes, no drug arrest policy etc.)

Cities increasingly are calling for safe injection sites, but it is against Federal law

Federal legislation doesn’t stop Seattle from allowing the sale of marijuana, so that is a pretty lame excuse.

Depends on what leverage the federal government has over shelters vs dispensaries.

LA tried it too.

There are several thousand shelter beds that go empty each night in LA County, include nearly a thousand in Skid Row, because the shelters have sobriety requirements and most of the homeless would rather be high than housed, especially in the summer.

In the winter, it's usually easier to convince the homeless to knock off the contraband and use the shelters, especially after the first dozen or so weather-related exposure deaths.

You don’t need to solve it. But there are numerous tried and proven ways of significantly reducing homelessness. We could start by evaluating and employing some of these.

That statement is the equivalent of inserting “just” into technical advice, as in “It’s just code” or “Just scale out.” If it was that simple, the problem would have been solved.

Here’s the laundry list of things Seattle has tried and is trying: https://www.seattle.gov/homelessness, https://www.seattle.gov/homelessness/addressing-the-crisis

Note that homelessness is not a problem of the same scale as Seattle in many cities around the country, and around the world.

These cities have in turn some measures and initiatives that are proven solutions that reduces homelessness. Note that not all of them could work in Seattle, but some of them might.

The most glaring one in response to this symptom is to offer at least some public bath options.

Hopefully with some better allocation of resources. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/seattle-taxpayers-fund-t...

yes we're supposed to fucking solve homelessness.