3 ms·

Not many people can personally care for 1600 homeless people in their attic.

voisin 4y ago
Touché
dredmorbius 4y ago
The situation here is also far more akin to what "homeless" meant pre-1980, or largely pre-1970. Up through the 1960s, homelessness was almost wholly a temporary condition, and the immediate result of some calamity: fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake, or other acute disaster. Homelessness was not used to describe the condition of being chronically unsheltered for the most part. Terms such as "transient", "unattached", "itinerant", "vagrant", and the like were more common. The condition was far more associated with working age men rather than families. This can be confirmed through Google's Ngram Viewer using a wildcard search such as "* homeless" (where "made homeless" and "rendered homeless" are among the top results in the period 1800--1970: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*+homeless&year_start=1800&year_end=1970&corpus=15&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*+homeless&yea...> Contrast 1971--2000 where these fall down ("made ...") or off ("rendered ...") the list entirely. You can also search the term in archives such as the New York Times where it is clear that through the early 1970s the term almost wholly applied to disasters. (I've noted this before on HN, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18499697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18499697>.) The bats in this story effectively suffered a single and acute shock. They were sheltered in an attic, and released back to the wild. Our experience with homelessness has shown that short-term shelters are not in fact viable interventions to solving the underlying causes. That's not to say that short-term interventions are never appropriate: when someone's drowning, throw them a line, get them out of the water, move them to safety, get them warm, etc. But if you find that a certain location, or population, seems to be continuously drowning, you might care to move upstream to find what's generating that condition. (The flagged parent comment is in some ways a shallow dismissal, but also a teachable moment.)

Touché

The situation here is also far more akin to what "homeless" meant pre-1980, or largely pre-1970. Up through the 1960s, homelessness was almost wholly a temporary condition, and the immediate result of some calamity: fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake, or other acute disaster. Homelessness was not used to describe the condition of being chronically unsheltered for the most part. Terms such as "transient", "unattached", "itinerant", "vagrant", and the like were more common. The condition was far more associated with working age men rather than families. This can be confirmed through Google's Ngram Viewer using a wildcard search such as "* homeless" (where "made homeless" and "rendered homeless" are among the top results in the period 1800--1970: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*+homeless&year_start=1800&year_end=1970&corpus=15&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*+homeless&yea...> Contrast 1971--2000 where these fall down ("made ...") or off ("rendered ...") the list entirely. You can also search the term in archives such as the New York Times where it is clear that through the early 1970s the term almost wholly applied to disasters. (I've noted this before on HN, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18499697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18499697>.) The bats in this story effectively suffered a single and acute shock. They were sheltered in an attic, and released back to the wild. Our experience with homelessness has shown that short-term shelters are not in fact viable interventions to solving the underlying causes. That's not to say that short-term interventions are never appropriate: when someone's drowning, throw them a line, get them out of the water, move them to safety, get them warm, etc. But if you find that a certain location, or population, seems to be continuously drowning, you might care to move upstream to find what's generating that condition. (The flagged parent comment is in some ways a shallow dismissal, but also a teachable moment.)