r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Garey_Coleman • 8d ago

Where are the homeless supposed to go?

Cities have been cracking down on homeless people so they can’t have encampments or stay on sidewalks. At the same time usually the shelters are full. So those who are unable to get into a shelter, where are they supposed to go?

8.2k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

4.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.6k

u/whatugonnadowhenthey 8d ago edited 8d ago

Since no one is answering the question in good faith, I’ll give it a shot. Honestly, most cities don’t give a shit if a homeless guy is sleeping on a stoop or in a alley or something, it’s been part of living in a city for thousands of years. They care when dozens of them set up tent cities in public areas and start trashing them. That’s when it becomes a real problem because once a tent city is established, less regular folk go to the area, which leads to more homeless, which leads to less regular folk, which leads to businesses leaving, etc. etc.

So the answer to your question is out of open air drug dens and into more individual spaces that are less of an eye sore and quite frankly a danger to the community. Literally “disperse”.

132

u/Conscious-Strawberry 8d ago

"Literally disperse" to where?

A tent community got busted up in my local area not too long ago. For years after that, it wasn't uncommon for me to find unhoused folks IN MY YARD. One of them broke into the stairwell of our apartment building. Do you know how scary it is to be flying out the door to get to work, just to find a sleeping unhoused person in your stairwell behind a door that's supposed to be locked?

So you've done a good job explaining why these laws are made (eyesore, unsafe conditions, etc). But you really haven't answered OPs question at all of where are they supposed to go after they "disperse"?

And when folks make these laws without giving these humans a place to go, conditions can become much less safe. I can avoid a tent city. A sleeping homeless man who broke into my apartment building bc he had no where else to go when that tent city was broken up? Harder to avoid.

And no, my story is not some one-off thing. Many others who live near tent cities that were broken up have had similar experiences

These people need somewhere to go and sleep at night, just like you and me. That's why I support affordable housing laws and local support programs for the chronically homeless folks

153

u/MissDisplaced 8d ago

No one is answering because there is no answer. At the highest levels of government, they never answer where homeless people (who aren’t, say mentally ill or criminals) should go. There is no actual resource for that.

The US had this problem during the Great Depression and the answer was the WPA for public works (how lots of bridges and roads and national parks got built), or the military.

26

u/theoneandonly6558 8d ago

That was the eventually solution but many camps sprung up during the Great Depression and many were cleared, burned, destroyed, etc multiple times. I had a great aunt and uncle who lived in a tent during the Great Depression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooverville

4

u/MissDisplaced 8d ago

My grandparents were super poor but weren’t homeless, but they did work for the WPA off and on. Lots of public works infrastructure projects. I think the younger men got housing and pay provided. Lots of federal money spent on infrastructure instead of military (US didn’t have a big military in the early 30s, that only ramped up later). Of course a lot of that eventually did turn to military supply type jobs as we saw a war was coming.

An interesting time.