People forget that not every homeless person is just someone temporarily down on their luck. Iirc that $20b figure is just housing the homeless, which doesn’t fix things for people who are mentally ill, drug addicts, or both, and that’s like 60-80% of the chronically homeless.
It’s a massively complex issue with no simple fix.
You’re right, a 100% fix of the problem is not simple or easy. But there’s a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that we can tackle to make huge strides.
While drugs and/or mental illness may be involved in a high percentage of the chronically homeless, the chronically homeless only account for somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3 of all homeless. So housing the other homeless would still take care of the needs of ~80% of all homeless, give or take. Get single-payer healthcare up and running to prevent more people from ending up in those situations, and change from a retributive justice system to one that cares about rehabilitation, and suddenly we’ve got a society that actually cares about people, and would cost less to run while we’re at it.
But, with a functioning safety net, people won’t feel like they have no other choice but to work a shit job for shit wages, and the oligarchs can’t have that.
i would add that housing-first approaches increase the likelihood that mental health and substance use treatment even work long term.
hard to wanna get sober when you’re being harassed by police or other people. hard to stay sane when you’re barely surviving and putting drugs on top to cope.
right now, many people experiencing homelessness and severe mental illness/addiction are hospitalized for a few days or a week and then they go back to the street. which doesn’t do much except get an individual out of immediate crisis. many will repeat this pattern over and over until incarceration or death.
I mean, yeah - it’s that AND the meth.
And heroin, and severe mental illness.
People forget that not every homeless person is just someone temporarily down on their luck. Iirc that $20b figure is just housing the homeless, which doesn’t fix things for people who are mentally ill, drug addicts, or both, and that’s like 60-80% of the chronically homeless.
It’s a massively complex issue with no simple fix.
You’re right, a 100% fix of the problem is not simple or easy. But there’s a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that we can tackle to make huge strides.
While drugs and/or mental illness may be involved in a high percentage of the chronically homeless, the chronically homeless only account for somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3 of all homeless. So housing the other homeless would still take care of the needs of ~80% of all homeless, give or take. Get single-payer healthcare up and running to prevent more people from ending up in those situations, and change from a retributive justice system to one that cares about rehabilitation, and suddenly we’ve got a society that actually cares about people, and would cost less to run while we’re at it.
But, with a functioning safety net, people won’t feel like they have no other choice but to work a shit job for shit wages, and the oligarchs can’t have that.
i would add that housing-first approaches increase the likelihood that mental health and substance use treatment even work long term.
hard to wanna get sober when you’re being harassed by police or other people. hard to stay sane when you’re barely surviving and putting drugs on top to cope.
right now, many people experiencing homelessness and severe mental illness/addiction are hospitalized for a few days or a week and then they go back to the street. which doesn’t do much except get an individual out of immediate crisis. many will repeat this pattern over and over until incarceration or death.