If you're in California get involved! I have

http://www.sonomacountyhomeless.com

It's no good asking to have ideas presented to you for critique and evaluation. Go and talk to street people and get their perspective. Challenge out of touch politicians and root out corruption or it will get worse.

The irony is, the point of my comments in this thread were to move from Zhenya's bagging on both politicians and homeless people without offering any constructive solutions, to having a productive discussion about how to make things better.

It worked to some extent.

It generated a lot of ideas, and I learned a lot. I hope it helped others too.

I'm happy with my contribution involving keeping my own severely mentally-ill relatives off the streets. If our family hadn't gotten lucky with some county programs, a couple of people close to me would now be living on the street due to no fault of their own. They're sick, and it's a full-time job split between various family members to keep them above water.

Thanks for your input. I apologize if I come across as overly argumentative. I'm just bored and interested in the subject. If we were in person, I'd buy you a beer.

All over the western world we urgently need political leadership who are interested in investing in holistic prevention of expensive worst case scenarios. We don't have viable safety nets and support systems but we do have a burgeoning 'homeless industrial complex' that is intimately linked to the prison industrial complex. This is profoundly wrong IMO and I am very vocal about that. This lack of a safety net coupled with labor and cost intensive care for the mentally ill and addicted is corrosive to society on so many levels and fundamental to everyone's quality of life. The only way to change this is to be extremely noisy and aggressive about what our 'leadership' is doing IMO. I am partially motivated from a young bay area relative dying from opioid o/d this February after his family had burned through a huge sum on rehabs, chasing after him + the emotional burn out toll. We are headed in the wrong direction...