Talk to any homeless person in a tent city in the US and they will confirm most if not all of them are heavy drug abusers.<p>To solve the homelessness problem we first need to help these folks recover their health.<p>A drug addict with a house will still be a drug addict, the only difference is we won't see their struggle on the streets.<p>Seriously, if you have ever dealt with addiction you know when you are sick you can't even do the dishes or wash yourself, so how are these guys, just by getting a home, going to manage to get sober, find a job, pay the bills and eventually be able to support themselves and move out so that the next person in need can use the place?<p>Unfortunately the answer is very unpopular and controversial.<p>A drug addict will never voluntarily quit drugs and check themselves into rehab then follow a long, difficult treatment to get sober.<p>Addiction is an awful, depressing, humiliating and painful disease with momentary lapses of reason where many times you just want to put it all to rest with an overdose.<p>The most frustrating part is the resources are there, we can build SoTA facilities and run the programs and treatment plans these guys need, even customize them if necessary.<p>But again, we will somehow need to bring them in, most likely by force, and that's the part many in this country can't even consider for debate.
Sounds like we're living through the early stages of Will McIntosh's <i>Soft Apocalypse</i>.<p>>“Gradual” is the key here: Soft Apocalypse shows normal people clinging to the shreds of life as they knew it, while things slowly go from bad to worse. Many still hope that the economy will pick up and life will go back to what it used to be. Even though the streets are filled with homeless people and unemployment stands at 40%, others can still drive a car to work. [1].<p>1. <a href="https://www.tor.com/2011/04/13/the-gradual-collapse-of-a-society-a-review-of-soft-apocalypse-by-will-mcintosh/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.tor.com/2011/04/13/the-gradual-collapse-of-a-soc...</a>
The past 6-7 years or so I personally noticed a steep increase in homelessness in most metropolitan areas I visited and then slowly started to see an increase in homelessness in the surrounding areas. What was never clear to me was whether there was a genuine increase in homelessness or a change in policy/culture surrounding the "management" of homelessness. This article describes a mixed picture of homelessness (i.e. increases in some areas and decreases in other areas) which suggests to me that we have a policy problem that has a risk to create a feedback loop.<p>It feels to me that homelessness is more "tolerated" these days. If someone is sleeping in front of the metro station entrance we have a "leave them be" kind of attitude. I wonder if this correlates to a reduction in homelessness management systems like described in the article "less beds". If we're okay with homeless people camping on our trails and in our parks maybe there is less incentive to spend money on creating other places for them to go. Then with less places to go we have more homeless people so then we have less incentive to create places for them to go.<p>Makes me speculate if tolerance is part of the problem here. If culturally we found homelessness intolerable then we would be more motivated to solve it.
There are large swaths of rust belt cities with vacant housing. What about a National program to refurb that housing and rehouse the homeless<p>Basically, turn struggling cities into the business of rehabilitation — federal investment into local housing, rent paying tenants, medicine, treatment, etc.<p>Trying to build affordable housing in places like San Francisco doesn’t make sense.<p><a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/which-city-has-most-vacant-homes" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/which-city-has-most-vac...</a>
This is a fundamental problem with capitalism for which various band aids have been tried but no real solution has been found IMO.<p>Capitalism gives stuff according to one’s production, where one’s production is judged in a distributed way by others in the society (subject to various flaws and exploits, of course).<p>The question is - what do we do with the people whose production (again, as judged by others in society, not in any absolute sense) does not cross the threshold to get enough stuff to live?<p>We need to tack on some extra subsystem which generally has not integrated well with capitalism in terms of scalability, distribution of judgement, etc.<p>We should be looking for a decentralized fix of some sort, ideally, in the way that capitalism itself is decentralized. Any ideas?
Homelessness has causes. Fix those. Most homeless people do NOT want to be homeless. Is it the wages lagging inflation? Fix it. Is it housing rates skyrocketing? Fix it. Is it our broken physical and mental health systems? Fix them. Fix all the homeless people. They will love you.