What are we going to do about the homeless?

What are we going to do about the homeless?

I'm hearing more and more about the homeless problem all across the country. And now whole neighborhoods are being taken over by homeless encampments. I saw a headline about that earlier today. Neighbors calling out for help as their neighborhood is being taken over by the homeless encampments.

Now that 3/4 of Americans are struggling financially, again a headline within the past week, it goes to reason that the homeless population is about to grow again. It also speaks for itself that there isn't going to be a funding source to simply raise our tax and welfare spending to fix the problem.

If you remember, during the Great Recession, support services such as food pantries were stretched thin trying to meet the needs of the growing number of the financially insecure.

So, let's head off the problem at the pass and think about what we can do ahead of time. Any ideas? What are we going to do about the homeless?

 

american exceptionalism.

a large and thriving homeless population indicates a vibrant and effective capitalism. if everyone had a home and a place to clean up what would be the motivation for these people to work hard, learn some skills, and put some skin in the game.

 

If I were a Republican, I would say cut off social services, and then give them thoughts and prayers.

 

The Sepulveda Basin recreation area used to be my old stomping grounds. It is now a homeless encampment. They have tents, music playing, lots of liquor/been bottles and the smell of kush is in the air. I would enforce vagrancy laws and move them to camp sights with sanitation and law enforcement presence.

 

We could just take all the rich peoples extra homes and give them to the homeless.

Of course, 'rich people' in this context will just be anyone with more than one home, or anyone whose large home could be divided up to accomodate some extra people.

I guess that wouldn't be fair to renters tho. So we should move all the renters into the rich peoples extra homes, then move the homeless to where the renters were living.

Problem solved!

 

Self respect
Willingness to learn and educate yourself
Love of Family

 

The problem isn't solvable without a fundamental shift in how the economy operates. Right now the wealthy elite have lobbied regulators to allow them to monopolize the housing industry (among others) via large investment firms like Vanguard and Blackrock. The way that works is you or I give them (or one of their infinite subsidiaries) money, they use it to buy a house, they hire an agency to rent the house, and you get some of the rent money back as a periodic return on your investment. They do this with businesses as well. Theoretically, you or I get a say in how those rentals or businesses are run based on how much of a share our investment represents relative to other investors with other shares. Because theres so many investors with so much money, most people's 'share' of a say in how the rental or company is run is something like .00000001%, since even a large investment in Blackrock or Vanguard is essentially just a whole bunch of tiny investments in all their uncountably various assets. The result is that investors dont pay much attention to what Blackrock or Vanguard are actually doing- what they pay the employees of the businesses they buy or how much rent they charge the tennets of the homes they buy. So Blackrock and Vanguard (and they're not the only ones, just the biggest ones so Im picking on them out of laziness), or more accurately their largest and thus most influencial investors, decide how the things they buy are run. And apparently they all prefer the 'company store' approach to economics, where your housing, food and employment are all provided by and for the same entity, so no matter how much your 'living wage' is increased, your cost of living increases to match it and prevent you from actually prospering, stuck in an effective 'room and board' scenario of perpetual servitude. As they gain more rentals, cost of rent increases because of a reduction of competing options. And as they gain more businesses, pay decreases with the lack of competing options. This is the monopolization I referred to.

And before you start blaming the 'free market' for it, this was all illegal until the 'too big to fail' Bush admin bailouts failed to adequately fix the housing market, so the Obama admin openned it up for investment firms to do precisely this to 'bring prices back up.' Which 'worked' so well that now nobody (but them) can afford to buy a house.

Yay govt to the rescue...

 

Have we considered that some prefer that lifestyle? No bills, taxes, mortgage/rent, fuel, registration, insurances. They are freer than most. But those who are there by circumstance, all they need is a chance from the communities they live in, respect, understanding, compassion, support and offers of employment. Just a leg up to boost their self-worth.

 

I get that they want to be free and live in tents and commune with nature and whatever gross thing they do these days, but hear me out.
Barges. With tents and buckets and the smell of the ocean and clean air and they can paddle away to any place they like. Get tons of barges, and set them free to roam the vast seas!

this may be my finest idea since mexican barges where they also jump on board but don’t end up in Texas, just free to roam the sea and be happy.

 

Since you're not, what would you do?

 

So they can go all Somali pirate on the unsuspecting. Also, travel the seas as you say to stink up other parts of the world? Nice

 

Welfare spending CREATED the problem.

There's no fix but addressing the root cause. Don't enable dissolution .. either personally via bad parenting, or culturally.

 

barges don’t have power to move they just meander out to sea. Not really very piratey. They can go off to sea, whether they make it to other parts of the world is not our problem, that’s up to them!

if France or some other heroic place wants a bunch of freeloading barge bums I’d call that a win.

 

Ambushes. Not all of the homeless are what your perceptions are of them. Some are the product of getting severely raw deals in life. I suspect you're referring to actual freeloader types.

 

And more importantly, no rules. It's why they don't like shelters, and have a high rate of recidivism when assisted off the streets.

 

We have homeless on the streets, in part, because we shut down all the large mental health homes.

 

Yes, I’m not for loading them all up at once. I figure we get them talked into getting on the barges and then just pushing them off and letting fate take them like the SS Minnow.

 

Permanent human habitation at sea would indeed be a great boon for civilization. We really just have on big problem- storms. I think the answer may be in making something big and flexible enough that even the odd 'rogue wave' makes for just a bumpy ride instead of a catastrophe. Something like thousands of hardy, bouyant plastic cubes all linked together, flexible enough to move with large surface events, big enough to build a house on. Could prolly build them out of existing plastic refuse, much of it already at sea just waiting to be epoxied together into something useful.

 

Yeah, I forgot about the rules.

 

Hoping they find Gilligan's Island?

 

This doesn’t explain why every major metropolitan city in the country (extremely blue) has homeless literally everywhere.

 

that’s it! the way I see it version 1 is primarily plastic things that float that we don’t really need. I’d rather not waste a good barge from the get-go, just something to get a bunch of them moving off to a place where they’re not trying to clean my windshield for change.

Maybe version 2 is for people who want a houseboat but can afford better materials.
Either way I’d rather not encroach on their freedoms by spending coast guard money to worry about what they’re up to. If they wind up on a deserted island with coconut phones so be it.
That’s a win for everyone right there.

 

hoping is a strong word, but sure!

 

You're so considerate and thoughtful.

 

I have a solution, but it won't be a popular one and the ACLU will hate it:

Make it illegal to be homeless because it's a health risk to society.

Given the strong likelihood a homeless person is mentally ill/addicted to drugs, then give them a 5150 and decide where they go next, either jail, or a mental health facility (a good portion of them, in my view, are mentally ill people), or rehab and recovery/safe house/job program, a good section of them are drug addicted and unemployable and do petty crimes to feed their habit, but cannot afford an apartment so they live in the streets, if they are children who are escaping being trafficked for sex, then a safe house, and programs to get them back on their feet.

In my view, being homeless, because it's a health risk, should be illegal, and such persons should be picked up, taken somewhere, and dealt with in the appropriate fashion according to their circumstance.

I was homeless once, but it wasn't for long, because I had enough brains to do something about it, and I had friends who helped me.

In my view, if you are homeless and stay that way you are unable to cope with life, you have alienated everyone around you and now they shun you because you are beyond hope or help, and that must mean you are mentally ill, on drugs, too lazy or stupid, unemployable because you are a degenerate,etc. My view says homelessness is a crime whereby you surrender your rights and become a ward of the state, in some fashion depending on your reason why you are homeless. If you are a child, you go somewhere where they help children, get them back in school, etc.

They were interviewing people who were homeless, and most of them were lost souls, addicts, crazy people, unemployable and a health risk. However, one girl seemed real full of life, and she just chose to be homeless. She was dressed nice, was clean, and a back pack with her supplies, and she slept in parks. Still, I wonder why anyone would deliberately choose such a life. Some people who have nice vehicles, vans, and what not, actually have jobs and are doing to to save money, but I don't view that as true homelessness.

Here are some ideas, by various states.

https://www.treatmentadvocacycenter...2275-emergency-hospitalization-for-evaluation