Where are the homeless supposed to go?

[u/Garey_Coleman]

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?

[u/mortalmonger]

This is hard to answer as homeless is not a good description. There are lots of types of homelessness and until we can talk about homelessness that way it’s not something we can solve. Here is a good example:

-a homeless veteran fighting mental health issues -a mother and toddler son fleeing domestic violence -an LGBTQIA teen kicked out by his family for being xxxxx -a drug addict -a man who lost his apartment and living in his car while working -a bipoler woman refusing to take her meds and hallucinating and paranoid -a sex offender that has done his time and can’t find housing due to being a sex offender

Literally there is no “one place” all these people should go…

Homeless is the state you are in because of some other problem or choice….until we speak of homelessness by discussing the causes of homelessness and how we can prevent or mitigate those causes we are not solving anything. It would be like a doctor giving the same cure to everyone in a hospital and then being perplexed why the insulin didnt heal all the asthma and cancer patients…..

[u/etcpt → u/mortalmonger]

Also, the "homeless" as a whole are a much bigger population than the street campers you see most obviously. For every person camping on a sidewalk or sleeping on a park bench, there's at least one more person who is sleeping on a friend's couch, or in the woods on the edge of town where you'll never notice them, or in the back of their van at a rest stop looking like just another traveler who didn't get a hotel. So when we focus on the "visible homeless", even when we do outreach to them and try to address their needs directly, we risk looking right past those folks who are also housing insecure but maybe in a slightly better place.

[u/Stunning_Scheme_6418 → u/etcpt]

It's like its own caste system. You have vans and RVs and couch surfing then car campers then tent people then people sleeping out rough under the bridge or in bushes. You are right it's a much bigger population than people realize. When I was a car camper you wouldn't have pegged me as homeless because I used the resources for clothes and showers and never stayed the same place twice in a row.