Disclaimer: I would never make light of your having gone homeless or minimize your struggle.
It’s the war room, no shame in going after stuff like this haha. Out of the “cannot, have not, will not” Ven diagram I was firmly a “will not”. A hitch hiking gutter punk.
But do these places exist in this particular town to which your claim of 90% declining shelter was applied?
I was referring to portland.
I used to work a couple blocks from Skid Row in LA. Up to you if you think I fully grasp the severity of homelessness or not.
The P2P meth epidemic has changed the topography of homelessness incredibly.
Yes, and the vast majority of homeless also have 10 toes, but you wouldn't argue that having 10 toes causes homelessness, would you? You can run a statistical analysis, you'll find next to no correlation between drug use rates (or ODs) and homeless rates. Or to put it in layman's terms, it's more likely that homeless causes people to do drugs or to relapse than it is that doing drugs causes homelessness.
This is intellectually dishonest and you have to know that. People who become addicted lose their jobs. They lose their money. They lose their support system. I read plenty of studies that went either way in the drugs/homelessness cart/horse debate so I go with what logically makes sense and from my own experiences talking to homeless folks. Drugs. The majority of the severely problematic homeless folks were addicts before they lost it all.
And? That doesn't change that there isn't enough capacity for homeless even if usage was 100%.
So the city should build thousands more beds that will also remain empty?
Some combination of housing and treatment (there's obviously a gradient from the strictest form of this to looser forms of it) would lead to better outcomes and save taxpayer money compared to the status quo.
Not sure why you're trying to ascribe a worst case caricature to a homeless population that primarily does not resemble this. You're doing what a lot of folks here do, which is apply personal biases or sample bias to the entire problem. Some of the actions you've named are already crimes, some are not and should not be.
I am talking about the most problematic section of the homeless community because they are the ones making everything harder on everyday people. Your rights and where mine begin. I would like to be able to take my kid to play in the park without their being dirty needles on the playground. I don’t want these beautiful, natural, pristine natural places being absolutely destroyed by homeless encampments. The assaults and attacks, human shit on the sidewalk, people shooting ip in broad daylight, all of it should be the focus.
Like I’ve said in this thread multiple times: can nots, have nots, and will nots.
Take the cannots and get them the help they need through addiction counseling and psychiatric medication. From there they’ll move to one of the other bucketsa
Take the have nots and give them a leg up with social services. Affordable housing, job training and placement, counseling, welfare, transportation vouchers, take the might of the federal piggy bank and put it to good use.
The will nots: punish them for the crimes they commit and don’t let them make life worse for everyone else. If they aren’t fucking things up and/or making life harder or more dangerous for others then leave them be.
