> You can respect someone's autonomy... and, at the same time, help them not freeze to death. How do you do this at scale? One of the challenges with poverty a

> You can respect someone's autonomy... and, at the same time, help them not freeze to death. How do you do this at scale? One of the challenges with poverty and mental illness is that it gets hard to provide comfort, safety, and opportunity when the homeless are afraid and distrustful of each other, and often justifiably so. The reason there are so many niche shelters (women with kids, youth, LGBTQ, etc.) is that there's some consensus that the general population shelters are not safe. Some of that is just vanilla crime, but a lot of it is a result of a high concentration of the homeless who are mentally ill. And it's not generally a mystery which people are refusing help, medical treatment, or mentorship. At what point does it stop being "respecting autonomy" and start being "enabling dysfunction and abuse"?