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We give them plenty of help. What we don’t do is force them into shelters or mental hospitals, so many voluntarily choose to the live on the street. I remember

We give them plenty of help. What we don’t do is force them into shelters or mental hospitals, so many voluntarily choose to the live on the street. I remember one particularly cold Chicago winter where I made a couple dozen sandwiches to give to the homeless. I drove up to one of the large encampments under a bridge in my neighborhood where a guy was begging for money from cars passing by. I pulled up and offered him the sandwiches, and the guy smiled and said “no thanks, we just ordered a pizza!”. Mind you, these people were living in tents in the dead of winter! I remember another time when I bought a few different food items from a convenience store and offered them to a couple homeless guys sleeping in the sidewalk in the middle of downtown. They picked through the five or six items and each grabbed one thing. Nothing wrong with having preferences, but it astonished me that they didn’t want all of it. These people are not being deprived of their basic needs. They just don’t want to live in shelters.

NohatCoder 4y ago
It is not like you have enough shelters and/or mental hospitals for all those people anyway, and you certainly don't have anyone paying for admitting homeless people to a hospital. I think what your experience shows is that food is not that hard to come by in the US, the local shelter or soup kitchen may have sandwiches that are superior to yours. Pizza once in a while is way cheaper than a home, not to mention access to medical care, so they get the luxury they can afford.
goodpoint 4y ago
How comes that in the US people "voluntarily choose to the live on the street" when in most other countries people are happy to move into temporary houses when provided? > These people are not being deprived of their basic needs. They just don’t want to live in shelters. Or maybe shelters are very dangerous or too noisy to sleep or too difficult to access without enqueuing for hours every day or too far from places where people can earn some money with odd jobs or begging.

NohatCoder 4y ago

It is not like you have enough shelters and/or mental hospitals for all those people anyway, and you certainly don't have anyone paying for admitting homeless people to a hospital. I think what your experience shows is that food is not that hard to come by in the US, the local shelter or soup kitchen may have sandwiches that are superior to yours. Pizza once in a while is way cheaper than a home, not to mention access to medical care, so they get the luxury they can afford.

goodpoint 4y ago

How comes that in the US people "voluntarily choose to the live on the street" when in most other countries people are happy to move into temporary houses when provided? > These people are not being deprived of their basic needs. They just don’t want to live in shelters. Or maybe shelters are very dangerous or too noisy to sleep or too difficult to access without enqueuing for hours every day or too far from places where people can earn some money with odd jobs or begging.