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Personally, my goal is that homeless people can get access to great health care, which usually means housing, mental health care, and job placement, among other
by erikpukinskis 9y ago
Personally, my goal is that homeless people can get access to great health care, which usually means housing, mental health care, and job placement, among other things, so that they can quickly get back to work.
All the things you described (besides crack and meth) are a good start. We're missing key pieces, but your apparent solution (make their lives harder until they are driven to a slightly less bad place) is just pushing the problem onto someone else.
That's fine if you only care about your neighborhood, but it's obviously not a solution if your goal is to stabilize society.
- indlebe 9y agoI think the issue is that SF is the only one doing these things, thus attracts homeless from all over North America. When I did some volunteer work in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside, several times I heard homeless folk speak of their dreams of sneaking across the order to be homeless in SF.
- majormajor 9y agoWhat if you don't want to "get back to work"? What's the long term plan for people in that situation?
- zanny 9y agoIts cheaper to house and feed them in the minimum than have to pay to jail them or repair the damage they do on the street. If society weren't so hostile to some people, maybe they wouldn't shut off to participating in it. And even for those that don't - it makes financial sense to macroeconomically attempt to minimize the frequency of economic drop-outs but microeconomically it is much better to not just ignore the ones you have and force them on the street, because they cause a lot of property damage, which lands them in jail, where they got over a hundred thousand a year to keep imprisoned.
- majormajor 9y agoI'd agree on the benefits of providing housing, but you're probably not going to want to make it mandatory (what's the alternative? jail? that's wasteful) and you can damage a lot of property in a housing situation too (if not more). So economically, there has to be a recognition that some people are going to give up on the system and decide to stop trying to please a brutal economic machine, and that some of them may even become bad actors, in order to develop a realistic plan.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoI don't think those people exist. There are just people who don't like the job offers they've had so far.