4 ms·
You don’t need to solve all of homelessness, just providing something competitive with a bus could be a start one would think.
by CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
You don’t need to solve all of homelessness, just providing something competitive with a bus could be a start one would think.
- nostromo 7y agoSeattle has tried that. People with chemical addictions will not go to shelters because shelters don't allow you to be drunk or high. So shelter beds go unused, and people shoot up and drink in parks, on sidewalks, and on busses.
- crooked-v 7y ago> So shelter beds go unused Shelter bed usage in Seattle runs at 90% as of last year, with low reported use rate before that being an artifact of bad reporting rather than reflecting actual conditions [1]. [1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/qa-with-project-homeless-are-homeless-shelter-beds-sitting-empty/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/qa-with-p...
- runarberg 7y agoIf true, then there is something wrong with the policy that all shelters need to be sober. Introduce some number of shelters—in parts of the city where high drug usage is a problem—that include safe use spaces (i.e. with medical access, clean needles and dispose boxes, no drug arrest policy etc.)
- dmode 7y agoCities increasingly are calling for safe injection sites, but it is against Federal law
- gamblor956 7y agoLA tried it too. There are several thousand shelter beds that go empty each night in LA County, include nearly a thousand in Skid Row, because the shelters have sobriety requirements and most of the homeless would rather be high than housed, especially in the summer. In the winter, it's usually easier to convince the homeless to knock off the contraband and use the shelters, especially after the first dozen or so weather-related exposure deaths.