Almost all people you see on the streets end up there after burning all bridges in their personal lives because of their illness. You may not be aware of this but there are in fact a lot of options in existence for housing such people, it doesn't work because they are ill and without treatment (forceful), it is hopeless trying to help them.
Some but not all. There are many disparate causes of homelessness and mental illness is just one of them.
> _requiring_ treatment for the chronically homeless
That is hard to implement in a free country.
The past 2 years proves that entirely untrue.
> Free country
That choice is a radio button, not a checkbox. Can't have both.
You can demand an end to "mandates" and public health emergencies, but you must then applaud when those things end.
sure its such a difficult proposition to implement in a free country. i mean i am in india and every poor household gets basically free rations every month, free healthcare in government hospitals and now even a medical insurance for treatments in private run hospitals at no cost. sure that costs a shit tonne of money but what else to do with the tax collections? spending on weapons is one but other than that, yeah.
i have to ask, why is construction costs so outrageous in the US? here, labor costs ~$6-8/day, on an average the cost of construction per Sqft is around inr 2000-3500 or $25-$44 /sqft. there are resources that say usa average costs around $100-$200.
that is a lot confusing because the article mentions $837000/150=5580 sqft. is that a good size home for homeless?
Who said anything about communism? I was talking about forcing people to undergo mental health treatment against their will simply because they can't afford a place to live.
1. https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-08-07/men...
Back in June or July 2021, the governor invited the homeless to come to California with promises of free housing during a press tour.
I don't know if there are "one time" or "one shot" solutions. Certainly there are some unhoused that can be helped by that but I'm under the impression that most have issues that go substantially beyond a one time check or a pill or a one time treatment.
You'll find that most progressives don't actually like people camping in parks, they just think it's the best option out of all the shitty ones currently available.
If you want to fix homelessness, you need to provide all three of housing, psychological, and addiction services. Housing, not shelters - most people prefer sleeping in a tent to sleeping in a shelter. If you're not doing all three, you're just wasting your time and money.
I live in Seattle. Please tell me which facility within 50 miles of me will both safely house people, and provide psychiatric/drug treatment for them, and I'll get right onto advocating for getting people out of tents and into that facility. Does it have a name, address, and website?
Also, it needs to have room for 5,500 unsheltered homeless people. [1]
That facility, of course, does not exist. This is my entire point. In some parallel universe where support services exist, I'd prefer them being used over people living in tents. I'd even support mandating them, because I also don't like stepping over human shit when I take a walk in my neighborhood. We don't live in that parallel universe, though, and the services that exist aren't up to the task. Shelters are unsafe, have incredibly limited admission hours, are often at capacity, don't provide enough support services, and refuse to take addicts. There's a reason people are sleeping in tents, and that reason isn't 'they don't know that shelters exist'.
Those people know shelters exist. Those shelters either don't want those people, or those people don't want to live in those shelters, because that life is worse than living in a tent by the overpass. If we're going to talk about compassion, I'm not sure how compassionate it is to force people into a living condition that's worse than the squalor they already live in.
As of February 23rd, 2022, we have exactly three options that we can implement.
1. Sweep the streets and 'house' all homeless people in prison. [2]
2. Keep sweeping tent cities from street to street, shuffling people between 3rd and 4th and back to 3rd and back to 4th. [3]
3. Do nothing and let people live in tent cities.
There is no option 4. It doesn't exist. I'd like one to exist, but it doesn't.
I don't like any of these three options, but the one I dislike least is #3. We just voted for a city council that is going to double down on #2. My prediction is that four years from now, we'll be exactly where we are today. Nobody's building a magical housing and treatment facility for 5,500 people.
[1] There are, at any point in time, ~6,000 sheltered homeless and ~5,500 unsheltered homeless in King county (population 2,200,000).
[2] This is what people mean when they talk about criminalizing poverty.
[3] This is what we call 'Re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic'. This can be done on a local level, by sweeping tents out of neighbourhoods which complain the loudest, on a municipal level by having suburban police arrest people and release them in the city center, or on a national level, by giving mid-western homeless people a one-way bus ticket to the coasts. The net result is the same - it doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it around.
Yeah, that's the problem; nobody's building it, not because the facility is impossible to build or run, but because it would require the political will to compel anyone arrested on multiple counts of vagrancy to be held there on the condition of accepting some form of treatment or further counseling.
It is not magic; the tent city phenomena is not a permanent fixture of big west coast cities.
Nonsense. It's not being built because city voters (and, more importantly, city businesses like Amazon) like their money more than they like not seeing tent camps.
Complaining on AM radio about tent camps is free, fixing the problem is expensive.
You're attacking some weird progressive boogieman, when progressives aren't the ones winning city elections, or in control of the council. The winners of the most recent one are all status quo corporate candidates, who have zero qualms about fucking with homeless people (hence the re-introduction of the sweeps), but have every qualm about actually spending money on solving homelessness.
Musical chair sweeps are cheap, solutions are expensive. The political will to do something is there, it's just not the political will to do anything useful. You can't with a straight face blame progressives and bleeding hearts for not solving the problem, when they aren't the ones running the town.
> I don't think compelling longterm vagrants to accept mandatory psychiatric and drug treatment in a secure facility under state custodial care is criminalizing poverty.
> but because it would require the political will to compel anyone arrested on multiple counts of vagrancy
... So, hold on, let me get the record straight, is poverty and/or mental illness a crime or not? You seem to flip-flop on this from one post to the other.
I think that the burden ought to fall not only on King County voters, but on the WA & Fed. gov't to an extent. My cursory feeling is that my good progressive friends in Seattle would be happy to pay a tax increase, if that were to translate into a guaranteed significant reduction in misery.
<q>You're attacking some weird progressive boogieman</q>
Sorry, no. Well, not this time. The failing in this case is that there's no guarantee that anyone would remain in such a facility against their will, given that neither being an addict nor insane is enough to keep someone in jail in and of itself.
<q>you state that homelessness is not a crime, but in this one, you state that it is.</q>
I'm comfortable with the first two instances of sleeping rough or public drug use being misdemeanors; after that-you've gotta go.
I mean, yes, it's obviously unsustainable for the rest of the state/country to dump all its problems onto a few coastal cities. But lack of state/federal support is not a problem that KC can solve anytime soon. It can only push on the parts that it can solve.
> The failing in this case is that there's no guarantee that anyone would remain in such a facility against their will,
We're talking past eachother, here. It sounds like you're saying there's no point to building facilities because we don't want to compel people to live in them. I'm saying that it's unconscionable to compel people to live in facilities that, well, don't exist.
I postulate that if facilities existed, a lot of people who oppose criminalizing homelessness as of 2022 would find mandating them a reasonable compromise... If the facilities were actually better for homeless people than tent cities. It's a very low bar that we are currently failing to meet.
They're homeless because they're mentally ill, not because of the tautological nonsense of "they're homeless because they haven't a home". The mental illness is exceeded only by the stupidity of the policies.
Instead of the singular focus on establishing state-paid housing, _requiring_ treatment for the chronically homeless is far overdue. The option of shooting-up and camping on the streets clearly has not worked in any way -- show me the data for how that helps anybody.