There is a pervasive fear of being locked up in a psych ward, and those who do get medicine (via Medicaid or other assistance programs) stop taking it, because treatments for severe issues usually have very unpleasant side effects. It can take weeks of trial and error to find something that works, and all that time you are somewhere between a zombie and (as it was described to me) like going through pregnancy without the baby.
You either force people into care, or accept that many will scratch out a living on charity and trash without getting mental care. There isn't a middle ground between forcing and not forcing people to change.
If an individual is unwilling to accept involuntary medication, there are not many/any choices of programs.
In my opinion there is a distinct lack of mental health treatment options that treat patients with dignity. Those that have existed or still exist generally struggle to get funding.
If such programs do exist, I was unable to find any after weeks spent frantically searching for options for my medication resistant schizoaffective friend.
I was homeless with my adult special-needs sons and none us were drunks or addicts. There were programs for homeless single moms with minors but none for homeless single moms still responsible for adult children who couldn't care for themselves. There are programs for addicts and alcoholics but not for people who are homeless because of their medical situation.
Etc.
It's a fiction that "there are lots of programs for you and you just don't wanna get better." And even people who aren't homeless find mental health issues hard to resolve. That's not remotely some kind of solved problem.
Between them, I was losing my mind.
Was very close to being on the street when I finally got a correct diagnosis. Got treatment, and my mind cleared up. It wasn’t a mental condition, but every doctor wanted to treat it that way.
This was with great insurance and lots of money. Doctors just don’t like complex cases.
It also causes businesses (especially small ones which cannot afford private security) to move away, which erodes one of the objectives of this approach, which is to have small businesses of many sorts in the neighborhood. People may, in the abstract, like the fact that the business is tolerant of the poor and mentally ill, but they don't want to walk past them to go to that business. Definitely it's a bad, self-reinforcing situation.
You don't see the homeless population in those areas at nearly the same rates as downtown or near the areas where encampments are.
Thus your assumption that these areas will attract homeless populations would appear to be inaccurate.
In my area there is a lot of housing available, but the housing market rate has gone up so much that people with available housing don't want to rent it out to people with poor credit that have been adversely affected with financial issues, and if they are renting it out they aren't going to go below market rate. They'd rather it sit on the market for a year or more, all the while they can claim tax breaks and funding.
There is a lot of rural land as well. If you're homeless or struggling, unfortunately there is almost no place you can go in America with the exception of a few places like Slab City where you can basically inhabit some land and setup a basic shelter. Otherwise, you're at the mercy of landowners somewhere that maybe owns 1000 acres of land that they use for their leisure or the government, and they definitely don't want you on their property even if you're a nice individual just looking for a place. In America, you're expected to work and buy your freedom of the necessities of a basic shelter.
No... if you simply increase supply to actually meet demand, prices will fall. This affordable housing nonsense is a complete red herring. Affordable housing is a lottery solution that helps a handful of folks... and in many cases isn’t even affordable. America needs to stop trying to fix all these issues with these one off solutions and look at the bigger picture. Just build more homes. Go look at places like Japan where housing is affordable... it has nothing to do with mandated affordable housing which NEVER works.
However, if rural areas allowed individuals to have access to small plots of land and utilize cheap portable housing units where they could work on sustainable agriculture and community programs to promote self-sufficiency, and social safety nets to address issues of people with disabilities that may not be able to care for themselves without assistance then I believe the homeless crisis could be greatly adverted and also give purpose and fulfillment to those struggling with inner-city homeless issues.
> It isn't a supply and demand issue IMO.
With all due respect, you’re wrong and haven’t read about it enough then. Think about it like this, over the past few decades we’ve built fewer housing units than our population needed. This allowed demand to keep rising faster than supply, this pushed prices up. If you reverse that trend and make housing easier and cheaper to build, this trend would reverse.
I got myself off the street by moving into a cheap, small rental in a walkable neighborhood where my life works without a car. The need to own a car in the US is part of the burden that helps push some people out into the street. If we had more walkable neighborhoods where more people could make their life work without a car, that would help prevent homelessness for people who are currently at risk.
In the US, we straight up just need more housing. We have underbuilt for a long time and that helps push costs up.
We also need more small-ish scale housing in walkable neighborhoods. We have largely zoned those out of existence.
One reason crazy homeless people gravitate to big cities is because that's where they can get services. If you generally help people make their lives work across the US, then you would likely see less of this pattern.