https://jacobin.com/2023/02/cities-homeless-people-public-housing-police-raids
liberals will defend 
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2222103120
liberals will oppose
"Gosh what can we do about homelessness? It's such a desperately complex problem! If only someone had the solution, but nobody does!"
.... is a total lie.
Academics have known how to solve homelessness for 15 years (at least). The data is unambiguous. You solve homelessness by giving people homes. When you give them homes, then they are not homeless any more.
"Oh but the mental illness, the drug addiction..."
.... nope, bullshit. For starters, the majority of homeless people (people who currently can't afford accommodation) do not have a mental illness. And secondly, even if they did.... say they have depression.... do you think you can treat a depressed person sleeping under a bridge with talk therapy? Give them a home and they'll be less depressed.
The solution to homelessness is houses, just like the solution to hunger is bread and the solution to poverty is cash.
Okay that's nice and all, but have you even considered how that might effect the shareholders?
It's much easier to just lump all homeless people as schizophrenic heroin addicts then normal people who fell on hard times. Then they are nothing like you, and there's nothing to do about it. "It's just how some people are", but not you or anyone you know. If homeless people are like you, but had some bad luck, that's terrifying. It would also mean that they could be helped, and then society would have to do something/change, and that's clearly unacceptable.
the mental illness, the drug addiction...
which is, as you point out, highly exacerbated by poverty and homelessness and able to be treated more effectively if one is housed
Nimby's will complain about needles and feces on sidewalks, but when you suggest giving someone a studio where they could use drugs and shit outside of the public eye. They say "Not on my dime!"
My brother in Christ, your dime is paying to move what you are complaining about to the other side of the block!! Nothing is going away, nothing is getting solved! It makes me want to pull my hair out so much.
Obviously homelessness is much more complex than how I described it above but sometimes I try to think of ways to explain shit that will appeal to libs/assholes (as I did above) but even then they just....don't care.
Recently, a houseless woman's belongings were trashed during sweeps. With them were her daughters' ashes.
cw stats on abuse
I saw someone on reddit say about homeless people without social supports: "if you have absolutely no friends or family that's a YOU problem". How can. People be so fucking dense?
50+ percent of homeless people have been part of the foster care system
20 percent of foster youth who age out transition directly to homelessness
38 percent of homeless youth under the age of 18 experienced sexual abuse that contributed to their homelessness
90+ percent of homeless women have been sexually abused in their lifetimes
It's been proven that early childhood trauma impacts the likelihood of schizophrenia in adults
Yet when you shove all of the facts in their face, it's just another goalpost to move. Ugh
Literally yesterday I saw a white kid pissing next to a tree on a busy street in San Francisco. Nobody cared, not even the pigs parked right there on the street. I have a feeling that “but the shitting and pissing” is just a smokescreen for liberals’ desire for a final solution.
Absolutely! And they will absolutely go mask off about it all on the internet, too. I've seen the most vile, horrible things said about houseless people on local subreddits. It has nothing to do with rationality, economics, ethics, accountability; they just want people disappeared.
If you ask them about it they’ll still write you a 10,000 word essay about how it’s ackshually about ethics in street journalism when their entire point can be summed up in 3 words: “kill the minorities”.
One of my points of pride in being a resident of Houston is that the city is the national leader in homelessness reduction, because we use a Housing First policy instead of any of the dumb shit that the "coastal elite" like to champion.
I really wonder why housing first has been successful there and not on the west coast? There are tons of advocates for it but it always get stripped down and fought against so hard that a robust program never gets put into place.
Houston is actually a very blue city for Texas. There are a lot of GOP here, but by raw numbers, Harris County has more Democrats than any other county in the state. The city does the housing program with just the federal funds it receives, since the state ain't giving shit and there aren't enough taxes to do it with local funds. Having cheap housing relative to other cities our size has also certainly helped.
That's awesome, I'm definitely gonna look into the programs there. I just live in Oregon and supposedly we have some of the best homeless services in the US....yet we maybe only have like 2 housing first properties in my town that only fit like 2 percent of our houseless population.. I just don't understand. It's a solidly blue state (or has been) for decades, too. Realtors own everyone I guess.
"services" that do anything other than reduce homeless statistics by getting them back into housing arent even bandaids, they're life support for the system that failed these people to start with.
If a ministry puts a shelter together, but all they do is make sure ppl are fed and then promote gospel, well, I'm sorry, but they aren't helping fix the problem.
I agree. I do case management, and some of the things I do can make a big difference for folks, but just getting them an ID isn't going to cut it if they don't have a safe place to put it and it gets stolen or lost a week later. Getting them benefits is awesome but won't get them off of the street if there isn't housing that's readily available, affordable if not free, and not highly competitive to get into. Getting them set up with a PCP is great but without an advocate and without housing they'll still get discriminated against and passed over, or miss their appointments and get fired from the clinic, etc.
Here we seem to just half bake our ideas to appease the "city liberals" and the "rural conservatives", because Oregon is extremely conservative outside of Portland and Eugene. There are supposedly a lot of people who were in Portland city/county government that were staunch housing first advocates, but there was so much pushback and supposed bureaucracy that their efforts at housing first were considered a failure.
Then we decriminalize drugs, but don't build up the harm reduction centers, drop in sites, recovery houses, etc. before we implement it and so now tons of people say it's a failed measure and want to recall it.. And don't even MENTION the idea of safe injection sites either, that just would make too much fucking sense. It always feels as if any of these supposed efforts at fixing homelessness are intended to fail so everyone, libs and conservatives alike can say "SEE? Nothing works for these VERMIN, they need to just be locked up and shipped off to another state!".
By happenstance I can speak first hand on almost all those issues.
I've been homeless. Living in a tent, no utilities, on raw land with nowhere else to go - luckily. Nvm the years of effort, all day of every day, until I'm asleep from exhaustion - no days off - but from first hand experience, when you don't have a roof, you don't have any other problems.
Everything else is bullshit. The law, debt, society, other ppls opinions, retirement, benefits, all of it. Bullshit. Lie after lie. Everyday I can die, and everyday all of this (waves hand at the human built world) doesn't care, so why the fuck should I care? Once you figure out how to survive outside society, there's zero allure to going back to slaving away for minimum wage just to always be broke. If that's societies offer, it's not worth the paper it's written on. When you're on the outside looking in, and you've landed in the outs due to a series of circumstances that aren't your fault, let me tell you, sympathy is in short supply. I understand the allure of crime, especially when simply getting an apartment costs $7500 after first/last/deposits. When it's 10k just to have a roof and the neverending life tax thereafter (plus water/sewer/garbage!), motherfucker, there are people dying all over the world for much much less than that, and I'm supposed to be grateful!?! To be yoked?
I don't go that route, but I intimately get why some people do, now. Bad luck doesn't make someone do shitty things. Drugs don't make people do anything they wouldn't already do. Life/drugs don't make you a shitty person, it just exposes that you are one.
Being homeless will break most people. If they weren't addicts and didn't have mental health issues before, well, they probably have both now. And I get why. I by chance, have had a fascination with the old native ways since childhood, so much so, that I taught survival skills in my 20s. I wouldn't be alive today otherwise, guaranteed.
I'm located off Puget Sound. I've lived in Portland. I worked off Burnside downtown, so I know exactly what yr dealing with.
You seem to mean well, and I hope you try to really put yourself into the shoes of the fallen. it's hard to express the disappointment, anger, and disdain you have on the outs to someone who hasnt found themselves in that metaphorical canyon with sheer cliffs on all sides. The despair of an infected tooth. Cauterizing wounds. Smh.
Not unsurprisingly, to me, the "vermin" attitude sounds exactly like Europeans talking about the Roma. People just can't fathom that life could look at those shit hole we call civilization and say "naw, fam, I'll take my chances in the wild". At least the wild is honest, ffs.
Don't worry about me tho. I'm just picking up where Thoreau left off.
Yoo thanks so much for adding your perspective. It's definitely one I've heard from folks I talk to. It honestly makes more sense to me than doing what I'm doing to struggle to be a "normal, well adjusted" (lol) person. There are people I work with who camp way far out in the woods and refuse to live inside again if they have to be near other people. I will never try to guilt them or pressure them to engage in services when they tell me that. I had a client I was helping get an ID, he was staying in one of those pallet shelter communities. I asked him if he wanted to do any shelter assessment lists or anything like that. He told me "Nope, I have my pallet and that's good enough for me. I got out of prison and I tried and tried to do what I was supposed to, to try and get a house and a job and y'all didn't want me, so I don't fuckin' want it anymore". And that's valid as fuck, he was let down and shit on so much, WHY would he ever want to re-engage in this shitshow again? This world has failed them, other broken people have failed them.
I've never been homeless myself, but my mom has and I've seen some wild shit that a young kid shouldn't see so I have my share of trauma but I wouldn't ever pretend to understand what it's like to live how my clients live. But I want to listen, and I want to be angry with them and for them, and I want to cheer them on, and just be a safe person for them to just shoot the shit with more than anything.
as for the vermin thing, that is an actual thing that I've heard someone call homeless people online. That is some genocidal dogwhistling, I couldn't believe it. Local subreddits are cesspools
Keep doin what yr doin brother. There are few things in life that mean more than merely having an advocate.
It's life changing. Truly.
And fuck reddit. The local subreddits especially. The Seattle one is hot garbage, full of people who've never lived in Seattle spouting off right-wing hatred that doesn't reflect 95% of the thousands of people that I've personally met in the area. Portlands gotta be exactly the same. I recall reading in the Stranger (our version of the Willamette Weekly) that the police union has motherfuckers astroturfing and spreading the copaganda and I fucking believe it.
I was talking on a Tacoma thread about a guy i personally watched the TPD and state patrol kill and got told they did nothing wrong. When he was on the ground, surrounded, and 5 different tazers hit him. Uh huh. Defending that is unfathomable.
I followed the case. Internal Investigations said they did no wrong. Motherfuckers. ACAB.
It's so sad that when I hear about that kind of shit that I'm not surprised. There is ALWAYS a reason for people to victim blame.
Also kinda wild that the cops are astroturfing, though. I could definitely see that on Facebook. I think in general people who use reddit regularly are of particular demographics that are privileged and fake progressive, so I can see how the community opinion would be skewed. It's just so disheartening to see, though
The last guy to run for police union prez in Seattle, for reelection, his motto was literally "controlling the narrative".
Saying the quiet parts out loud.
The cruelty reinforces the Calvinist belief that the individual has achieved their relative financial stability due to their own moral quality and their hard work and entrepreneurship. If anyone could become homeless due to the whims of the Capitalist system they could not believe in their own moral superiority and chosenness. So they believe homeless people are moral failures, lazy, whatever. This protects their ego and justifies their support for the system. As long as people are homeless because they are morally bad then the system works. But to believe that they have to act cruelly and violently towards the homeless to demonstrate to themselves and others that they despise the indolence and moral turpitude of the undeserving poor
tldr; We have to go back in time and stop the Protestant Reformation
