r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Garey_Coleman • 9d 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?

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u/JPBillingsgate 9d ago

The chronically homeless, which is the homeless population that are problematic for cities, are not homeless because they have no money for food. It is mental illness, substance abuse, or a combination of both.

The second, larger, homeless population is much, much less of a problem and these are people who are much more able to seek and receive help. We should never stop being generous with these people as governments or as individuals.

For the first group, not only would it be hugely expensive to try and treat these people en masse, we would also have to be able to involuntarily commit many of them, which is something that is not legal in most cases now.

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u/AndWinterCame 9d ago

Fascinating breakdown, couldn't mention anywhere in it that you don't end up homeless by doing drugs or having psychosis go untreated, you actually become homeless by being unable to afford a home, that is by being priced out of the housing market. The problems you are attributing to the first group either start or dramatically worsen after months and years of being treated like less than human. It is a progressive, worsening circumstance, but saying that large swaths of the population are inherently homeless is wild.

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u/TonysCatchersMit 9d ago

You’re right give someone with untreated psychosis and addiction a home and they’re actually a true pleasure to live next door to.

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u/AndWinterCame 9d ago

Okay, well everyone here is acting like it's preferable to allow for government to permanently imprison these people (and any of us who succumb to medical debt while losing a job) than to even consider the validity of a system in which medical care and housing are universally guaranteed at the cost of offending billionaires.

Truly, what I am asking in this conversation is for people to consider what might one day befall people they know if not themself, and in doing so to ascribe the same humanity they would expect to the people already in that situation.

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u/TonysCatchersMit 8d ago edited 8d ago

There’s a man in my neighborhood in NYC that is not only mentally ill and an addict, but deaf and mute.

His favorite past time is getting loaded and assaulting, sometimes sexually, women in the neighborhood. Occasionally he’ll fight men but his preferred target is overwhelmingly women.

He’s been arrested and jailed, sure. Dozens of times. But he’s also been sent to alternatives to incarceration like drug treatment programs and mental health facilities all over the country. All at no cost to him, of course. He gets out, coping mechanisms and a pocket full of meds in hand, and quickly takes up his hobby again.

Surely, if this poor disabled man had a home he would take his med and stop smoking crack, drinking and groping and molly wallopping women?

Except, he does have a home. A government subsidized apartment with his father that the landlord can’t get him out of.

And now I’m sure you’re thinking; liar. Making hypothetical straw men up for internet points. But, alas, it isn’t so. Despite tax payer funded treatment he remained a violent menace.

While yes most of us are one medical emergency away from homelessness, maybe consider the possibility that dude with their dick in their hand shouting obscenities on the street corner might be there simply because he’s a fucking antisocial asshole.