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“Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could actually pay for a place to stay.” Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their

“Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could actually pay for a place to stay.” Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay?

worik 3y ago
> Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay? Yes Priorities?
robomartin 3y ago
> Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay? That solves absolutely nothing. I refer you to the $17B we spent in CA on this problem. The fundamental issues are mental health and addiction. All you achieve is making the problem invisible so everyone can feel like they did something. When, in reality, the root causes are not addressed at all. It is critical to understand that our laws DO NOT ALLOW US to force anyone to do anything. Meaning, if a mentally ill or addicted person says "I am not going anywhere" and "I refuse treatment" we CANNOT force them. The root causes, for the most part, are mental illness and addition. We cannot be effective helping these people because --by law-- we cannot effectively arrest and force them to accept help of any kind. In a lot of cases you have addicts who are 100% out of their mind and you are trying to reason with them to accept help. Good luck. A member of my family and a couple of good friends are professionals deeply involved with the treatment side of this issue. What they tell me is exactly what I have conveyed here. If we could force people into a solid 12 to 24 month program we could eliminate most of the problem in 5 to 10 years. We can't. Because we have laws that protect citizens from being detained and incarcerated unless they commit a crime. Mental health and addiction are not crimes. In other words, that path is impossible. How, then, do they propose this be solved? Conceptually simple. Politically...well, our politicians are fucking incompetent morons. You have to clamp down hard on the illicit drugs that are destroying so many lives. Shit like cocaine and heroin should not exist on our streets. Fentanyl-laced pills should not be able to pour through our border like candy (quite literally, google it). Etc. For some unexplained reason we are willing to burn $17B in just one state of this country to pretend we are helping people and virtue-signal and, at the same time, we refuse to put real money and effort into real actions that would almost make this problem disappear. Simple math: If none of the drugs a huge portion of these people take were to be available for, say, six months, most of them would gladly get detox help and come out of it a year later with a very different perspective in life. You have to stop the drugs. Things like safe injection spaces are horrible ideas. What you want is free detox centers and a complete clamp-down on drug availability. Then you get results. I was just in Singapore. Before I could fly there I had to sign a document that had a warning in big, bold, all upper-case letters that read: The penalty for bringing illicit drugs into Singapore is death. And there you go.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > I refer you to the $17B we spent in CA on this problem. The $17B on homelessness wasn't all on housing. > The fundamental issues are mental health and addiction. A lot of money is spent on those, too. By your own logic, the failure of that to correct the problem proves those are the wrong issue.
  - robomartin 3y ago
    Sorry, you don't know what you are talking about. There's report after report, from highly trusted sources such as Stanford, showing that up to 80% of the issue is mental health and 50% of those afflicted are addicted to drugs, with another 50% alcohol. The ONLY way to improve this is to stop the flow of drugs. And then, yes, we probably need to rethink some of our laws so we can have the ability to force people into programs to help them. Housing addicts and alcoholics or those with serious mental health issues does not fix anything at all. All you've accomplished it to make them invisible to society. Good job. They are still fucked. It's like lots of other issues, people love to jump on a moral high ground that sounds great. Feels good, right? It helps nobody at all. Just like safe places for addicts to inject themselves and free needles, etc. Somehow the term "moronic" isn't enough to describe these ideas. Talk to mental health professionals who actually work with the homeless --as I have, because we have many in our social group-- and you might just learn your ideas are not aligned with reality at all. Not even close.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Sorry, you don’t know what you are talking about. Yes, I do. > There’s report after report, from highly trusted sources such as Stanford, showing that up to 80% of the issue is mental health and 50% of those afflicted are addicted to drugs, with another 50% alcohol. Yes, there is lots of evidence that homelessness, addiction, and mental health issues are deeply intertwined (there’s a lot less clarity on root causation, and the evidence on solutions leans very heavily in favor of housing as key, but all of them needing to be addressed together. I wasn’t dismissing mental health and addiction as important areas to address, I was mocking the reductive, dismissive claim that spending money on housing and still having the problem proves that that is an incorrect place to invest; you could say the same thing just as much about mental health and addiction, because very large chunks of money have been spent on those things and…the problem persists. But, of course, that’s because the logic is bunk, and its just as stupid applied to housing as it is to behavioral health.

“Saying the issue is lack of homes implies these people could actually pay for a place to stay.” Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay?

worik 3y ago

> Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay? Yes Priorities?

robomartin 3y ago

> Or we could just… choose to house people, regardless of their ability to pay? That solves absolutely nothing. I refer you to the $17B we spent in CA on this problem. The fundamental issues are mental health and addiction. All you achieve is making the problem invisible so everyone can feel like they did something. When, in reality, the root causes are not addressed at all. It is critical to understand that our laws DO NOT ALLOW US to force anyone to do anything. Meaning, if a mentally ill or addicted person says "I am not going anywhere" and "I refuse treatment" we CANNOT force them. The root causes, for the most part, are mental illness and addition. We cannot be effective helping these people because --by law-- we cannot effectively arrest and force them to accept help of any kind. In a lot of cases you have addicts who are 100% out of their mind and you are trying to reason with them to accept help. Good luck. A member of my family and a couple of good friends are professionals deeply involved with the treatment side of this issue. What they tell me is exactly what I have conveyed here. If we could force people into a solid 12 to 24 month program we could eliminate most of the problem in 5 to 10 years. We can't. Because we have laws that protect citizens from being detained and incarcerated unless they commit a crime. Mental health and addiction are not crimes. In other words, that path is impossible. How, then, do they propose this be solved? Conceptually simple. Politically...well, our politicians are fucking incompetent morons. You have to clamp down hard on the illicit drugs that are destroying so many lives. Shit like cocaine and heroin should not exist on our streets. Fentanyl-laced pills should not be able to pour through our border like candy (quite literally, google it). Etc. For some unexplained reason we are willing to burn $17B in just one state of this country to pretend we are helping people and virtue-signal and, at the same time, we refuse to put real money and effort into real actions that would almost make this problem disappear. Simple math: If none of the drugs a huge portion of these people take were to be available for, say, six months, most of them would gladly get detox help and come out of it a year later with a very different perspective in life. You have to stop the drugs. Things like safe injection spaces are horrible ideas. What you want is free detox centers and a complete clamp-down on drug availability. Then you get results. I was just in Singapore. Before I could fly there I had to sign a document that had a warning in big, bold, all upper-case letters that read: The penalty for bringing illicit drugs into Singapore is death. And there you go.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> I refer you to the $17B we spent in CA on this problem. The $17B on homelessness wasn't all on housing. > The fundamental issues are mental health and addiction. A lot of money is spent on those, too. By your own logic, the failure of that to correct the problem proves those are the wrong issue.
- robomartin 3y ago
  Sorry, you don't know what you are talking about. There's report after report, from highly trusted sources such as Stanford, showing that up to 80% of the issue is mental health and 50% of those afflicted are addicted to drugs, with another 50% alcohol. The ONLY way to improve this is to stop the flow of drugs. And then, yes, we probably need to rethink some of our laws so we can have the ability to force people into programs to help them. Housing addicts and alcoholics or those with serious mental health issues does not fix anything at all. All you've accomplished it to make them invisible to society. Good job. They are still fucked. It's like lots of other issues, people love to jump on a moral high ground that sounds great. Feels good, right? It helps nobody at all. Just like safe places for addicts to inject themselves and free needles, etc. Somehow the term "moronic" isn't enough to describe these ideas. Talk to mental health professionals who actually work with the homeless --as I have, because we have many in our social group-- and you might just learn your ideas are not aligned with reality at all. Not even close.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Sorry, you don’t know what you are talking about. Yes, I do. > There’s report after report, from highly trusted sources such as Stanford, showing that up to 80% of the issue is mental health and 50% of those afflicted are addicted to drugs, with another 50% alcohol. Yes, there is lots of evidence that homelessness, addiction, and mental health issues are deeply intertwined (there’s a lot less clarity on root causation, and the evidence on solutions leans very heavily in favor of housing as key, but all of them needing to be addressed together. I wasn’t dismissing mental health and addiction as important areas to address, I was mocking the reductive, dismissive claim that spending money on housing and still having the problem proves that that is an incorrect place to invest; you could say the same thing just as much about mental health and addiction, because very large chunks of money have been spent on those things and…the problem persists. But, of course, that’s because the logic is bunk, and its just as stupid applied to housing as it is to behavioral health.