4 ms·

Something like 85% of those homeless have unresolved psychiatric & drug-abuse issues. It's not compassionate to let them do their thing, and squat in filth on p

Something like 85% of those homeless have unresolved psychiatric & drug-abuse issues. It's not compassionate to let them do their thing, and squat in filth on public sidewalks untreated.

vkou 5y ago
No, it's not particularly compassionate, but when no alternative exists, it's better than criminalizing poverty, or from sweeping people out of 3rd street, into 4th street, and then, three weeks later, back to 3rd. You'll find that most progressives don't actually like people camping in parks, they just think it's the best option out of all the shitty ones currently available. If you want to fix homelessness, you need to provide all three of housing, psychological, and addiction services. Housing, not shelters - most people prefer sleeping in a tent to sleeping in a shelter. If you're not doing all three, you're just wasting your time and money.
- linksnapzz 5y ago
  I don't think compelling longterm vagrants to accept mandatory psychiatric and drug treatment in a secure facility under state custodial care is criminalizing poverty. Doing that would make the housing problem all the more solvable for those homeless whose ultimate and not proximate problem is affordability of shelter & transport.
  - vkou 5y ago
    > I don't think compelling longterm vagrants to accept mandatory psychiatric and drug treatment in a secure facility under state custodial care is criminalizing poverty. I live in Seattle. Please tell me which facility within 50 miles of me will both safely house people, and provide psychiatric/drug treatment for them, and I'll get right onto advocating for getting people out of tents and into that facility. Does it have a name, address, and website? Also, it needs to have room for 5,500 unsheltered homeless people. [1] That facility, of course, does not exist. This is my entire point. In some parallel universe where support services exist, I'd prefer them being used over people living in tents. I'd even support mandating them, because I also don't like stepping over human shit when I take a walk in my neighborhood. We don't live in that parallel universe, though, and the services that exist aren't up to the task. Shelters are unsafe, have incredibly limited admission hours, are often at capacity, don't provide enough support services, and refuse to take addicts. There's a reason people are sleeping in tents, and that reason isn't 'they don't know that shelters exist'. Those people know shelters exist. Those shelters either don't want those people, or those people don't want to live in those shelters, because that life is worse than living in a tent by the overpass. If we're going to talk about compassion, I'm not sure how compassionate it is to force people into a living condition that's worse than the squalor they already live in. As of February 23rd, 2022, we have exactly three options that we can implement. 1. Sweep the streets and 'house' all homeless people in prison. [2] 2. Keep sweeping tent cities from street to street, shuffling people between 3rd and 4th and back to 3rd and back to 4th. [3] 3. Do nothing and let people live in tent cities. There is no option 4. It doesn't exist. I'd like one to exist, but it doesn't. I don't like any of these three options, but the one I dislike least is #3. We just voted for a city council that is going to double down on #2. My prediction is that four years from now, we'll be exactly where we are today. Nobody's building a magical housing and treatment facility for 5,500 people. [1] There are, at any point in time, ~6,000 sheltered homeless and ~5,500 unsheltered homeless in King county (population 2,200,000). [2] This is what people mean when they talk about criminalizing poverty. [3] This is what we call 'Re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic'. This can be done on a local level, by sweeping tents out of neighbourhoods which complain the loudest, on a municipal level by having suburban police arrest people and release them in the city center, or on a national level, by giving mid-western homeless people a one-way bus ticket to the coasts. The net result is the same - it doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it around.
    - linksnapzz 5y ago
      <q> Nobody's building a magical housing and treatment facility for 5,500 people. </q> Yeah, that's the problem; nobody's building it, not because the facility is impossible to build or run, but because it would require the political will to compel anyone arrested on multiple counts of vagrancy to be held there on the condition of accepting some form of treatment or further counseling. It is not magic; the tent city phenomena is not a permanent fixture of big west coast cities.
      - vkou 5y ago
        > Yeah, that's the problem; nobody's building it, not because the facility is impossible to build or run, but because it would require the political will to compel anyone arrested on multiple counts of vagrancy to be held there on the condition of accepting some form of treatment or further counseling. Nonsense. It's not being built because city voters (and, more importantly, city businesses like Amazon) like their money more than they like not seeing tent camps. Complaining on AM radio about tent camps is free, fixing the problem is expensive. You're attacking some weird progressive boogieman, when progressives aren't the ones winning city elections, or in control of the council. The winners of the most recent one are all status quo corporate candidates, who have zero qualms about fucking with homeless people (hence the re-introduction of the sweeps), but have every qualm about actually spending money on solving homelessness. Musical chair sweeps are cheap, solutions are expensive. The political will to do something is there, it's just not the political will to do anything useful. You can't with a straight face blame progressives and bleeding hearts for not solving the problem, when they aren't the ones running the town. > I don't think compelling longterm vagrants to accept mandatory psychiatric and drug treatment in a secure facility under state custodial care is criminalizing poverty. > but because it would require the political will to compel anyone arrested on multiple counts of vagrancy ... So, hold on, let me get the record straight, is poverty and/or mental illness a crime or not? You seem to flip-flop on this from one post to the other.
        linksnapzz 5y ago
        <q>It's not being built because city voters (and, more importantly, city businesses like Amazon) like their money more than they like not seeing tent camps.</q> I think that the burden ought to fall not only on King County voters, but on the WA & Fed. gov't to an extent. My cursory feeling is that my good progressive friends in Seattle would be happy to pay a tax increase, if that were to translate into a guaranteed significant reduction in misery. <q>You're attacking some weird progressive boogieman</q> Sorry, no. Well, not this time. The failing in this case is that there's no guarantee that anyone would remain in such a facility against their will, given that neither being an addict nor insane is enough to keep someone in jail in and of itself. <q>you state that homelessness is not a crime, but in this one, you state that it is.</q> I'm comfortable with the first two instances of sleeping rough or public drug use being misdemeanors; after that-you've gotta go.

Something like 85% of those homeless have unresolved psychiatric & drug-abuse issues. It's not compassionate to let them do their thing, and squat in filth on public sidewalks untreated.

vkou 5y ago

No, it's not particularly compassionate, but when no alternative exists, it's better than criminalizing poverty, or from sweeping people out of 3rd street, into 4th street, and then, three weeks later, back to 3rd. You'll find that most progressives don't actually like people camping in parks, they just think it's the best option out of all the shitty ones currently available. If you want to fix homelessness, you need to provide all three of housing, psychological, and addiction services. Housing, not shelters - most people prefer sleeping in a tent to sleeping in a shelter. If you're not doing all three, you're just wasting your time and money.

linksnapzz 5y ago
I don't think compelling longterm vagrants to accept mandatory psychiatric and drug treatment in a secure facility under state custodial care is criminalizing poverty. Doing that would make the housing problem all the more solvable for those homeless whose ultimate and not proximate problem is affordability of shelter & transport.
- vkou 5y ago
  > I don't think compelling longterm vagrants to accept mandatory psychiatric and drug treatment in a secure facility under state custodial care is criminalizing poverty. I live in Seattle. Please tell me which facility within 50 miles of me will both safely house people, and provide psychiatric/drug treatment for them, and I'll get right onto advocating for getting people out of tents and into that facility. Does it have a name, address, and website? Also, it needs to have room for 5,500 unsheltered homeless people. [1] That facility, of course, does not exist. This is my entire point. In some parallel universe where support services exist, I'd prefer them being used over people living in tents. I'd even support mandating them, because I also don't like stepping over human shit when I take a walk in my neighborhood. We don't live in that parallel universe, though, and the services that exist aren't up to the task. Shelters are unsafe, have incredibly limited admission hours, are often at capacity, don't provide enough support services, and refuse to take addicts. There's a reason people are sleeping in tents, and that reason isn't 'they don't know that shelters exist'. Those people know shelters exist. Those shelters either don't want those people, or those people don't want to live in those shelters, because that life is worse than living in a tent by the overpass. If we're going to talk about compassion, I'm not sure how compassionate it is to force people into a living condition that's worse than the squalor they already live in. As of February 23rd, 2022, we have exactly three options that we can implement. 1. Sweep the streets and 'house' all homeless people in prison. [2] 2. Keep sweeping tent cities from street to street, shuffling people between 3rd and 4th and back to 3rd and back to 4th. [3] 3. Do nothing and let people live in tent cities. There is no option 4. It doesn't exist. I'd like one to exist, but it doesn't. I don't like any of these three options, but the one I dislike least is #3. We just voted for a city council that is going to double down on #2. My prediction is that four years from now, we'll be exactly where we are today. Nobody's building a magical housing and treatment facility for 5,500 people. [1] There are, at any point in time, ~6,000 sheltered homeless and ~5,500 unsheltered homeless in King county (population 2,200,000). [2] This is what people mean when they talk about criminalizing poverty. [3] This is what we call 'Re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic'. This can be done on a local level, by sweeping tents out of neighbourhoods which complain the loudest, on a municipal level by having suburban police arrest people and release them in the city center, or on a national level, by giving mid-western homeless people a one-way bus ticket to the coasts. The net result is the same - it doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it around.
  - linksnapzz 5y ago
    <q> Nobody's building a magical housing and treatment facility for 5,500 people. </q> Yeah, that's the problem; nobody's building it, not because the facility is impossible to build or run, but because it would require the political will to compel anyone arrested on multiple counts of vagrancy to be held there on the condition of accepting some form of treatment or further counseling. It is not magic; the tent city phenomena is not a permanent fixture of big west coast cities.
    - vkou 5y ago
      > Yeah, that's the problem; nobody's building it, not because the facility is impossible to build or run, but because it would require the political will to compel anyone arrested on multiple counts of vagrancy to be held there on the condition of accepting some form of treatment or further counseling. Nonsense. It's not being built because city voters (and, more importantly, city businesses like Amazon) like their money more than they like not seeing tent camps. Complaining on AM radio about tent camps is free, fixing the problem is expensive. You're attacking some weird progressive boogieman, when progressives aren't the ones winning city elections, or in control of the council. The winners of the most recent one are all status quo corporate candidates, who have zero qualms about fucking with homeless people (hence the re-introduction of the sweeps), but have every qualm about actually spending money on solving homelessness. Musical chair sweeps are cheap, solutions are expensive. The political will to do something is there, it's just not the political will to do anything useful. You can't with a straight face blame progressives and bleeding hearts for not solving the problem, when they aren't the ones running the town. > I don't think compelling longterm vagrants to accept mandatory psychiatric and drug treatment in a secure facility under state custodial care is criminalizing poverty. > but because it would require the political will to compel anyone arrested on multiple counts of vagrancy ... So, hold on, let me get the record straight, is poverty and/or mental illness a crime or not? You seem to flip-flop on this from one post to the other.
      - linksnapzz 5y ago
        <q>It's not being built because city voters (and, more importantly, city businesses like Amazon) like their money more than they like not seeing tent camps.</q> I think that the burden ought to fall not only on King County voters, but on the WA & Fed. gov't to an extent. My cursory feeling is that my good progressive friends in Seattle would be happy to pay a tax increase, if that were to translate into a guaranteed significant reduction in misery. <q>You're attacking some weird progressive boogieman</q> Sorry, no. Well, not this time. The failing in this case is that there's no guarantee that anyone would remain in such a facility against their will, given that neither being an addict nor insane is enough to keep someone in jail in and of itself. <q>you state that homelessness is not a crime, but in this one, you state that it is.</q> I'm comfortable with the first two instances of sleeping rough or public drug use being misdemeanors; after that-you've gotta go.