To save you a click, the "City in Idaho", which is clearly written to make it sound like a village of like 10 people in the middle of nowhere, is Boise.
Don’t feel so bad, the article is also sounds like it was written by someone who has never been to LA. Skid Row overflowed into Little Tokyo several years ago, creating a new ad hoc neighborhood name “Skid Rokyo”.
Oh and the there’s the giant homeless encampments every 1-3 miles as you drive around LA.
I grew up in LA but moved away in 2009. I was shocked when I visited this past year. Homeless encampments everywhere, taking over sidewalks in West LA, kind of scary aggressively homeless men harassing people in the street in West Hollywood. No wonder everyone drives everywhere in LA.
Yeah, go for a walk down the Arakawa or Sumida embankments (not right now, I guess, given that was all recently underwater) and you'll find some semi-permanent camps in a good state of repair. Talked to some of the guys by one and apparently they've got a pretty strong culture of self-enforcing cleanliness and not messing with the civilians, since they'll get cleared out if the cops get legitimate complaints from people in the area
In the article, Boise is challenging a court ruling that cities cannot ticket or arrest the homeless if there are no shelter beds available. This begs the question how ticketing/arresting clears the streets? By shoving them elsewhere for another city to ticket? Or housing them in jail (at a much higher expense)?
Later in the article it does mention that LA (correction from Boise) is also voiding millions of citations on the homeless, and that those citations were keeping the homeless from accessing services, like housing. That brings even more questions about the usefulness of ticketing for homelessness.
Edit: correction it is LA not Boise voiding citations.
Then at least you don't have residents complaining about homeless tent camps. And the cops feel like they have a tool to "fight homelessness." And the added (perceived) incentive of disincentivizing people from coming to your area to be homeless and set up semi-permanent tent camps.
Not true. In San Francisco, 35% of homeless residents in the last point-in-time count identified as female, and another six percent identified as another non-male gender.
That isn’t true. First, you have to distinguish between the visible and invisible homeless. Homeless women who aren’t mentally ill or heavily into drugs are very likely to get access to a shelter at least, so you wouldn’t notice them (the same is true for men as well, just less so). And then you have mentally ill or heavily drug addicted women, you notice these in LA also. It isn’t clear to me why there are more men in this category than women, but perhaps they get more family or social support as well.
No. If there are children in any of these encampments, I would say that they need to especially be broken up. Homelessness in modern America is to a great degree elective. People need to be harassed off the streets and into shelters for their own welfare -- especially children -- or involuntarily committed.
I've worked on getting some individual people into assisted living situations, etc. The problem has never been lack of beds. It has been the individual involved.
There are a few good books on all of this. It's not a resource problem in the Western world. It's a mental illness and drug problem.
EDIT: I should say rather, the major problem has never been lack of beds. Sometimes I've had to wait a few days, etc., or choose a different place. Nobody has infinite money. But it has never been a major or insurmountable problem.
Assuming your limited interface is representative, and there in fact always are more usable beds available than homeless people (I doubt this, but only have anecdotal evidence to the contrary from working with homeless people) - how does that translate into 'homelessness is elective'? I've seen a multitude of reasons that destroy peoples lives, and makes them unable to be a productive, rent-paying, law-abiding citizen.
Also, bed availability aside - I've heard many who are scared of the available shelters, due to threats, drug dealing or harassment from other ill-fortuned inhabitants.
Maybe we just define 'elective' differently.
I urge anybody who is worried about homelessness in their area, to try and dig deeper into possible root-causes for wide-spread homelessness. Maybe each and every individual homeless person have made bad or even catastrophic decisions that led them to their calamity, but if that really is the case (just for arguments sake - my experience says otherwise for most cases), why are so many making these bad decisions? Let's treat systemic problems as such, and make sure that we don't only focus on relieving symptoms, and maybe we find homelessness to be a solvable problem.
> I've heard many who are scared of the available shelters, due to threats, drug dealing or harassment from other ill-fortuned inhabitants.
And so they move to a tent encampment? This makes no sense.
The problem isn't even the bad and catastrophic decisions that homeless people made to get them into the situation -- would that it were -- for the permanent homeless, it is the bad and catastrophic decisions they make on a daily basis to keep themselves in it.
How to treat this? Involuntary mental health incarceration. Police ticketing and other harsh actions to break up the cycle and keep people from being comfortable with their homeless situation. Destroy the social anti-patterns that are keeping people trapped.
Do you know anyway with a child in this situation? Ask them how their offers of money and help went, and what happened when that help was delivered. You may have an interesting conversation.
I struggle to understand what points you are making. Are you saying that since these people are making life difficult for themselves, there can be no external causes behind that behavior? It sounds a lot like "their own fault, not my problem" to be honest.
On one hand, I do understand these are tools to "do something" that may occasionally help, on the other hand, sometimes tools when available become overused and I think are fundamentally inadequate for addressing the root (very difficult) problem. I think LA has actually in recent years brought online a lot of added housing for the homeless, but unfortunately the numbers of homeless seems to also be surging upwards; and in almost all US cities it seems.
I think that is an error in the article. I live in Boise. The law allows ticketing if there IS room in shelters. People would not be ticketed if the shelters are full.
Not saying it's a good law. But the article is wrong.
Edit: Here is the relevant section of the actual code.
> Enforcement: Law enforcement officers shall not enforce this camping section when the individual is on public property and there is no available overnight shelter
Boise Mayor David Bieter is attempting to challenge a landmark federal court ruling that prohibits cities from ticketing or arresting homeless people for sleeping or camping on public property if there are no shelter beds available as an alternative.
Hi Boise person, been thinking of visiting your city for the first time because I hear so many great things about it (except for this mayor), when is the best time to visit?
> This begs the question how ticketing/arresting clears the streets [if there are no shelter beds available]? By shoving them elsewhere for another city to ticket?
Driving people elsewhere is one major mechanism.
That can mean to other cities - it's a zero-sum game, but so is buying homeless people bus tickets to leave, and cities do that too.[1] It can also mean pushing them outside city limits into the metro area, or into less-desirable areas with fewer officers and/or informal instructions not to ticket the homeless. (Similarly, arresting homeless people isn't meant to house them in jail, but to get them out of heavily-policed areas.)
> Driving people elsewhere is one major mechanism.
This is exactly how Boise has kept it's homeless population low for many years. First they ticket people, then jail them and finally offer to let them go if they get on a bus headed out of the state.
Tragedy of the commons is a major factor here. Any city that looks 'homeless friendly' will get people shipped to it from other cities, sometimes as part of explicit 'bus ticket' programs.
Really solving this will take work at the national level. There's more than enough wealth around to fund it, given how much goes into the pockets of opioid manufacturers alone.
Homeless people are also fairly mobile, it doesn’t take that much to come up with a $50 bus ticket even if they don’t bother hopping freight cars anymore. Hell, many can even scrounge up enough for one way tickets to Hawaii (...and Hawaii will often take care of the ticket back).
Of course all urban centers are so starved of entry level housing that anything good enough to minimally get a homeless person off the street (bathroom, place to sleep, maybe kitchenette) would also be swamped by everyone from the poor and working, college students, immigrants, etc.
Suppressing this housing is all done in the name of maintaining and increasing housing values for the affluent. If you increase the supply of housing, the value of housing drops, and white people don't want that.
> Of course all urban centers are so starved of entry level housing that anything good enough to minimally get a homeless person off the street (bathroom, place to sleep, maybe kitchenette) would also be swamped by everyone from the poor and working, college students, immigrants, etc.
I doubt it; one of the reasons that homelessness is a difficult problem is that some homeless people are very unpleasant to live with, which means other homeless people prefer to remain on the street rather than share housing with them.
Not all homeless are homeless because of mental health or substance abuse issues, but those that are homeless for other reasons are more likely to get help so you don’t notice them as much.
Mental health and substance abuse issues don't spontaneously emerge on their own. Lack of money, housing, personal life, etc. are huge contributing causes.
Mental health / substance can cause homelessness. Homelessness can cause mental health / substance. It’s a shit cycle either way, but the one certainty is we are not addressing either in a meaningful way.
Claiming there are no fundamental material/economic problems, such as with housing, and pretending homeless people are just a lost cause of mentally ill substance abusers is certainly not going to solve any problems, except maybe putting your conscience at ease. Housing is not the only problem, but there are fundamental material issues which greatly increase the chance of mental illness and substance abuse.
That's the way some politicians/media try to spin it, but it's not the whole story.
Many homeless don't have mental health and substance abuse issues, but are just forced out of their homes on debt, etc. And of course some develop mental health (and sometimes substance abuse issues) after living homeless.
This was mostly during the vietnam era the government has been better about that but doctors freely prescribing drugs that destroy lives is a much bigger issue. Pooling data from 2002 to 2012, the incidence of heroin initiation was 19 times higher among those who reported prior nonmedical pain reliever use than among those who did not. A survey by the United States Conference of Mayors found that 68 percent of cities reported that substance abuse was the largest cause of homelessness for single adults. Substance abuse was also reported as one of the top three causes of family homelessness by 12 percent of cities.
In fact in seattle, King County, sued
PURDUE PHARMA, L.P.; PURDUE
PHARMA, INC.; THE PURDUE FREDERICK
COMPANY, INC.; ENDO HEALTH
SOLUTIONS INC.; ENDO
PHARMACEUTICALS, INC.; JANSSEN
PHARMACEUTICALS, INC.; JOHNSON &
JOHNSON; SEATTLE PAIN CENTER
MEDICAL CORPORATION d/b/a SEATTLE
PAIN CENTER; FRANK D. LI; SALES
REPRESENTATIVES JOHN.
This is where it starts, as much as it would be great to turn this into a debate about the US military these pharmaceutical companies and Holy Prestigious Doctors are far and away the major cause of these issues.
It's not an either/or. It's often both. 11% of the homeless population is US military veterans [1], often returning home with undiagnosed or untreated mental illnesses. They're failed by our healthcare system (same as opioid abusers) and sent out onto the streets. I'm sure there is significant overlap with prescription drug abuse and homeless veterans as well.
Heroin can't be prescribed in the US, but if it could, or if other opioids could be prescribed for addiction rather than just physical pain, it would help immensely. If it was supervised, it would end overdoses, needles on the ground, and a ton of other needless suffering and death. The addicts might even decide to wean off with help, get jobs, and start leading normal lives. That's what's happened in places that have tried this, including southern California before prohibition. Of course with people advocating for solutions that have been proven now for over a hundred years not to work like yours, we won't be solving this problem anytime soon. Of course, when most people can't be bothered to think or research, they'll just spew out this type of uneducated, stupid bullshit because that's what everyone else is doing. And that feels good. All the while their neighbors are dying or sent to jail so that people can feel righteous in their stupidity.
Because in a constitutional form of government there are lots of things that cities are not allowed to do, and judicial relief from those unconstitutional, or otherwise illegal actions is expected and by design.
According to the US Ninth Circuit, 42 U.S.C. §1983, and the 8th Amendment to the US Constitution, prohibiting the imposition of excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishment, on the basis that homeless people have no choice in the matter of their homelessness.
The powers are not granted by the courts, the Constitution is interpreted by the courts. The concept of judicial review goes back to the country's founding.
One thing that I have never understood about this discussion is why it always seems to avoid the following question:
What about people who want to be homeless?
Why have we built a society in which anybody who doesn't accept the lifestyle of sleeping in a static, hardened structure, and working to pay rent or a mortgage so as to have the right to do so, is diagnosed with some kind of illness?
Isn't it quite clear that there are some humans that simply aren't built to live with this strange definition of normalcy?
I have lived on a school bus for the past five years (if you are curious about this aspect, I gave a talk at PyCon last year that might interest you[0]) and I have met literally thousands of people like those I'm describing. I'm convinced that there are hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - in the USA.
Of people that I have met who live on streets, in forests, in mobile vehicles like me, and in all sorts of other configurations that are not "homes" as we typically understand that word, I think that something like 1% are a nuisance to the extent that some kind of intervention is warranted for the public good. And, for what it's worth, that's probably true of about 1% of people who aren't homeless as well.
Now, in the age of smartphones, small-scale solar charging, and remote work, it's easier than ever to be happily homeless.
Let's stop acting like it's such a problem.
Help the people who are homeless and want to stop being homeless. Don't judge the people who are homeless and loving life.
I don't know about millions, but I have firsthand experience and no one would know just by meeting someone like this that they had no fixed place of residence.
I think you overestimate the number of homeless by choice vs homeless by circumstance. You also are sort of marginalizing the homeless who need help by painting them as happily homeless. Very naive take on the situation.
> I think you overestimate the number of homeless by choice vs homeless by circumstance.
Well, we can't really know the numbers here. But the discussion seems to never include this phenomenon, so I think it's fair to say that this particular constituency is under-represented in the discussion even if there were only a small number of people.
And again, I think there are many, many such people - I have personally met thousands without really trying. There are Rainbow Gatherings in every state, each with thousands or tens of thousands of such people, and this is just one gathering of one subset of this population.
> You also are sort of marginalizing the homeless who need help by painting them as happily homeless.
I don't mean to do that. I think that people who actually need help are being marginalized by casting such a wide net as to lose them. If people want help, why aren't we directing resources there? Instead of sending the police to arrest people who don't want help?
> Very naive take on the situation.
In a literally sense, I think it's not naive. I have been houseless for most of my adult life. How much of this phenomenon have you personally experienced?
That's an interesting take. I don't think most people have an issue with a nomadic lifestyle, as long as you can afford it, and it doesn't interfere with other people's lifestyle choices.
I think those latter two points are rare, but I might be mistaken. How many homeless have a job and pay taxes, but choose to be homeless?
I think at the end of the day it's about having the ability to afford yourself and care for yourself. And we tend to believe that if an adult doesn't have this ability (as opposed to the opportunity), then it is a handicapped individual, either physically or mentally handicapped in some way. That's why I think most people believe homeless which aren't suffering from the lack of this ability most likely just lack the opportunity.
There is a public nuisance aspect to people who are living on the street or in forests on land they don’t own/rent. Even mobile vehicles can be problematic if they are parked on the street without access to decent facilities.
I don’t think many would have a problem with someone who lacked a permanent home but setup camp or their vehicle on a formal campground with reasonable hygiene facilities so they weren’t pooping in the street and we weren’t walking over their tents.
> There is a public nuisance aspect to people who are living on the street or in forests on land they don’t own/rent.
I don't think there is a connection to property ownership and the presence of a nuisance caused by people.
So what if people are living on land that they don't own and rent? Who has decreed that land ownership must be the absolute fundamental social norm? What if people are instinctually disinclined to believe or participate in land ownership?
Why do we insist on being the only animal for which a subset charts the entire landmass of the earth into a grid, assigning ownership to every square inch? It's absurd.
People tenting under bridges, on bike trails, in forests, don't bother me. Rich people have stolen far more from my family than poor people have.
There is a high correlation between squatting and property damage. People simply don’t respect what isn’t theirs, and anyways, the lack of formal infrastructure (plumbing, septic, ...) doesn’t give them a lot of options.
There are many territorial animals who protect their territory from intruders and humans are by far not the only one. Is your complaint about humans refining the process and erecting a formal framework around this instead of constantly deciding who owns the territory in a fight like other animals? I don't think you'd like it more, to be honest.
> Why have we built a society in which anybody who doesn't accept the lifestyle of sleeping in a static, hardened structure, and working to pay rent or a mortgage so as to have the right to do so, is diagnosed with some kind of illness?
Equally amusing is that we attempt to make this a requirement, but do not make this a fundamental right in association with said requirement.
If you're going to MAKE people have something, it should be provided for them IMO.
Definitely. I'm by no means saying "Do nothing, let them die." But I'm also saying "We have to rehabilitate them" is not a good enough idea either - you can't make people want help.
You can make people receive help. We just don't do that anymore because we've adopted a principle of radical autonomy, which apparently includes the "freedom" for the mentally ill and addicted to literally rot on the streets.
Many homeless advocates seem to have similar fears as gun rights advocate. Whereas some people vociferously oppose gun restrictions because of an irrational fear of helplessness in the face of crime if they couldn't carry a gun anywhere and everywhere, some homeless advocates vociferously oppose forced psychiatric and drug abuse treatment because of an irrational fear--obscured by a simplistic, self-serving sense of empathy--that they'll somehow be forced into such treatment or otherwise lose their own autonomy.
The boogey man of big government out to get you isn't just a motivating fear of the right, it's also a motivating fear of the left.
The article says 1,000 - 2,000 homeless in Boise, but at 2,000, a little quick MATH shows that Boise's homelessness rate may be a tad higher than LA's:
Boise: 2,000 homeless in population of 227,000 = 1:113
LA: 36,000 homeless in population of 4,000,000 = 1:111
Given the difference in annual weather, it's not clear that Boise policy is effective in reducing homelessness.
> Given the difference in annual weather, it's not clear that Boise policy is effective in reducing homelessness.
They might winter in Portland or even LA.
Spokane is another city in that area with a huge homeless problem, and perhaps even harsher weather (Boise is at least high desert). Though housing can be super cheap, my granddad used to run what we thought became basically a flop house that we nicked named the Empty Arms.
SLC seems to have focused more on housing the homeless, but even then I think in recent years they’ve found that their success has mainly just led to a larger problem.
It's an exhausting problem. I live in Portland, which is just another west coast city having increasing trouble with a rising homeless population. On one hand yes, they're people and they deserve help and support and appropriate housing and access to rehab and structure. But on the other hand, if you buy a house in Portland there's very little you can do to prevent your front sidewalk from getting turned into a homeless camp. Having seen first hand how frequently camps are also drug dens, it's really tiring stepping over hundreds of dirty needles and needle-caps when you leave every morning. And the smell of piss and shit in every offstreet doorway in the city. When my mom visited we were driving over the Morrison bridge and a homeless man was pissing off the side in broad daylight - not a care in the world.
So yes, help them. But also just do something, anything at all.
I have heard the hundreds of dirty needles sentiment from people but have never encountered a neighborhood in LA where there are hundreds of dirty needles on the ground. Is there any photos of this phenomenon online you could point me to or is this mostly hyperbole?
Caps are way more common, but every monday morning the front stoop at my old office would have a handful of used needles on it. I suppose the hyperbole would be implying "hundreds" of dirty needles all in one place. When I walk to work, I see many, but rarely are there more than 2-3 in one spot.
Doesn't have to be "hundreds of dirty needles on the ground" in the same spot . It's enough that there are hundreds of dirty needles on the ground to be discovered in the span of a couple square miles or so...
They will also need to remove a few inches of topsoil to clean it up. This is the sort of procedure that is used to clean up toxic chemical spills, high levels of pollution, and nuclear waste.
As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
Bucky Fuller had the idea that we should build houses in factories and deliver them by helicopter. They were designed to fit onto a central mast that supported them and had hook ups for utilities. Basically he wanted to apply the automated assembly line to homes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house
108 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadOh and the there’s the giant homeless encampments every 1-3 miles as you drive around LA.
Later in the article it does mention that LA (correction from Boise) is also voiding millions of citations on the homeless, and that those citations were keeping the homeless from accessing services, like housing. That brings even more questions about the usefulness of ticketing for homelessness.
Edit: correction it is LA not Boise voiding citations.
Then at least you don't have residents complaining about homeless tent camps. And the cops feel like they have a tool to "fight homelessness." And the added (perceived) incentive of disincentivizing people from coming to your area to be homeless and set up semi-permanent tent camps.
20% of all homeless are under 18
Source: https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2018-AHAR-P... Page 11.
How did you determine that?
There are a few good books on all of this. It's not a resource problem in the Western world. It's a mental illness and drug problem.
EDIT: I should say rather, the major problem has never been lack of beds. Sometimes I've had to wait a few days, etc., or choose a different place. Nobody has infinite money. But it has never been a major or insurmountable problem.
Also, bed availability aside - I've heard many who are scared of the available shelters, due to threats, drug dealing or harassment from other ill-fortuned inhabitants.
Maybe we just define 'elective' differently.
I urge anybody who is worried about homelessness in their area, to try and dig deeper into possible root-causes for wide-spread homelessness. Maybe each and every individual homeless person have made bad or even catastrophic decisions that led them to their calamity, but if that really is the case (just for arguments sake - my experience says otherwise for most cases), why are so many making these bad decisions? Let's treat systemic problems as such, and make sure that we don't only focus on relieving symptoms, and maybe we find homelessness to be a solvable problem.
And so they move to a tent encampment? This makes no sense.
The problem isn't even the bad and catastrophic decisions that homeless people made to get them into the situation -- would that it were -- for the permanent homeless, it is the bad and catastrophic decisions they make on a daily basis to keep themselves in it.
How to treat this? Involuntary mental health incarceration. Police ticketing and other harsh actions to break up the cycle and keep people from being comfortable with their homeless situation. Destroy the social anti-patterns that are keeping people trapped.
Do you know anyway with a child in this situation? Ask them how their offers of money and help went, and what happened when that help was delivered. You may have an interesting conversation.
Not saying it's a good law. But the article is wrong.
Edit: Here is the relevant section of the actual code.
> Enforcement: Law enforcement officers shall not enforce this camping section when the individual is on public property and there is no available overnight shelter
https://citycode.cityofboise.org/home/standard/7-3A-2
Boise Mayor David Bieter is attempting to challenge a landmark federal court ruling that prohibits cities from ticketing or arresting homeless people for sleeping or camping on public property if there are no shelter beds available as an alternative.
Driving people elsewhere is one major mechanism.
That can mean to other cities - it's a zero-sum game, but so is buying homeless people bus tickets to leave, and cities do that too.[1] It can also mean pushing them outside city limits into the metro area, or into less-desirable areas with fewer officers and/or informal instructions not to ticket the homeless. (Similarly, arresting homeless people isn't meant to house them in jail, but to get them out of heavily-policed areas.)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattl...
This is exactly how Boise has kept it's homeless population low for many years. First they ticket people, then jail them and finally offer to let them go if they get on a bus headed out of the state.
If one cannot force the homeless to leave, how does one positively incentivize people to stop living in the street?
Really solving this will take work at the national level. There's more than enough wealth around to fund it, given how much goes into the pockets of opioid manufacturers alone.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/think-utah-solved-homeles_b_9...
OFF the street?
Of course all urban centers are so starved of entry level housing that anything good enough to minimally get a homeless person off the street (bathroom, place to sleep, maybe kitchenette) would also be swamped by everyone from the poor and working, college students, immigrants, etc.
Suppressing this housing is all done in the name of maintaining and increasing housing values for the affluent. If you increase the supply of housing, the value of housing drops, and white people don't want that.
I doubt it; one of the reasons that homelessness is a difficult problem is that some homeless people are very unpleasant to live with, which means other homeless people prefer to remain on the street rather than share housing with them.
See https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-07/homeless...
Many homeless don't have mental health and substance abuse issues, but are just forced out of their homes on debt, etc. And of course some develop mental health (and sometimes substance abuse issues) after living homeless.
In fact in seattle, King County, sued PURDUE PHARMA, L.P.; PURDUE PHARMA, INC.; THE PURDUE FREDERICK COMPANY, INC.; ENDO HEALTH SOLUTIONS INC.; ENDO PHARMACEUTICALS, INC.; JANSSEN PHARMACEUTICALS, INC.; JOHNSON & JOHNSON; SEATTLE PAIN CENTER MEDICAL CORPORATION d/b/a SEATTLE PAIN CENTER; FRANK D. LI; SALES REPRESENTATIVES JOHN.
This is where it starts, as much as it would be great to turn this into a debate about the US military these pharmaceutical companies and Holy Prestigious Doctors are far and away the major cause of these issues.
[1] http://nchv.org/index.php/news/media/background_and_statisti...
Assuming that is an affordable solution (it's not), we will then simply end up with destroyed houses.
Oh, except Boise has a population of 228000 to LAs 4 million.
So LA is 17 times larger. So basic scaling would be equivalent to 28-35k homeless.
I think the reason Boise is having less difficulty with homelessness is solely because it’s a small city.
What about people who want to be homeless?
Why have we built a society in which anybody who doesn't accept the lifestyle of sleeping in a static, hardened structure, and working to pay rent or a mortgage so as to have the right to do so, is diagnosed with some kind of illness?
Isn't it quite clear that there are some humans that simply aren't built to live with this strange definition of normalcy?
I have lived on a school bus for the past five years (if you are curious about this aspect, I gave a talk at PyCon last year that might interest you[0]) and I have met literally thousands of people like those I'm describing. I'm convinced that there are hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - in the USA.
Of people that I have met who live on streets, in forests, in mobile vehicles like me, and in all sorts of other configurations that are not "homes" as we typically understand that word, I think that something like 1% are a nuisance to the extent that some kind of intervention is warranted for the public good. And, for what it's worth, that's probably true of about 1% of people who aren't homeless as well.
Now, in the age of smartphones, small-scale solar charging, and remote work, it's easier than ever to be happily homeless.
Let's stop acting like it's such a problem.
Help the people who are homeless and want to stop being homeless. Don't judge the people who are homeless and loving life.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRp84BlFF94
I think you overestimate the number of homeless by choice vs homeless by circumstance. You also are sort of marginalizing the homeless who need help by painting them as happily homeless. Very naive take on the situation.
Well, we can't really know the numbers here. But the discussion seems to never include this phenomenon, so I think it's fair to say that this particular constituency is under-represented in the discussion even if there were only a small number of people.
And again, I think there are many, many such people - I have personally met thousands without really trying. There are Rainbow Gatherings in every state, each with thousands or tens of thousands of such people, and this is just one gathering of one subset of this population.
> You also are sort of marginalizing the homeless who need help by painting them as happily homeless.
I don't mean to do that. I think that people who actually need help are being marginalized by casting such a wide net as to lose them. If people want help, why aren't we directing resources there? Instead of sending the police to arrest people who don't want help?
> Very naive take on the situation.
In a literally sense, I think it's not naive. I have been houseless for most of my adult life. How much of this phenomenon have you personally experienced?
I think those latter two points are rare, but I might be mistaken. How many homeless have a job and pay taxes, but choose to be homeless?
I think at the end of the day it's about having the ability to afford yourself and care for yourself. And we tend to believe that if an adult doesn't have this ability (as opposed to the opportunity), then it is a handicapped individual, either physically or mentally handicapped in some way. That's why I think most people believe homeless which aren't suffering from the lack of this ability most likely just lack the opportunity.
I don’t think many would have a problem with someone who lacked a permanent home but setup camp or their vehicle on a formal campground with reasonable hygiene facilities so they weren’t pooping in the street and we weren’t walking over their tents.
I don't think there is a connection to property ownership and the presence of a nuisance caused by people.
So what if people are living on land that they don't own and rent? Who has decreed that land ownership must be the absolute fundamental social norm? What if people are instinctually disinclined to believe or participate in land ownership?
Why do we insist on being the only animal for which a subset charts the entire landmass of the earth into a grid, assigning ownership to every square inch? It's absurd.
People tenting under bridges, on bike trails, in forests, don't bother me. Rich people have stolen far more from my family than poor people have.
Equally amusing is that we attempt to make this a requirement, but do not make this a fundamental right in association with said requirement.
If you're going to MAKE people have something, it should be provided for them IMO.
You can make people receive help. We just don't do that anymore because we've adopted a principle of radical autonomy, which apparently includes the "freedom" for the mentally ill and addicted to literally rot on the streets.
Many homeless advocates seem to have similar fears as gun rights advocate. Whereas some people vociferously oppose gun restrictions because of an irrational fear of helplessness in the face of crime if they couldn't carry a gun anywhere and everywhere, some homeless advocates vociferously oppose forced psychiatric and drug abuse treatment because of an irrational fear--obscured by a simplistic, self-serving sense of empathy--that they'll somehow be forced into such treatment or otherwise lose their own autonomy.
The boogey man of big government out to get you isn't just a motivating fear of the right, it's also a motivating fear of the left.
Boise: 2,000 homeless in population of 227,000 = 1:113
LA: 36,000 homeless in population of 4,000,000 = 1:111
Given the difference in annual weather, it's not clear that Boise policy is effective in reducing homelessness.
They might winter in Portland or even LA.
Spokane is another city in that area with a huge homeless problem, and perhaps even harsher weather (Boise is at least high desert). Though housing can be super cheap, my granddad used to run what we thought became basically a flop house that we nicked named the Empty Arms.
SLC seems to have focused more on housing the homeless, but even then I think in recent years they’ve found that their success has mainly just led to a larger problem.
So yes, help them. But also just do something, anything at all.
They will also need to remove a few inches of topsoil to clean it up. This is the sort of procedure that is used to clean up toxic chemical spills, high levels of pollution, and nuclear waste.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/q13fox.com/2017/10/23/ex-addict...
Where are the the piles of needles people keep claiming they need to walk over on their way out of their apartments in Seattle?
As I went walking I saw a sign there, And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." But on the other side it didn't say nothing. That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, By the relief office I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you and me.
(Archive link for those who prefer non-broken web experiences or want to avoid supporting publishers that actively want to break the web.)
Everyone who wants one should have a home.