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"While the homeless may always be with us, we need to ensure that we are helping them in the most effective ways possible. For the city named after Francis of A
by sankyo 12y ago
"While the homeless may always be with us, we need to ensure that we are helping them in the most effective ways possible. For the city named after Francis of Assisi, a nobleman who gave away everything he had when he saw a poor man on the street, nothing less is acceptable."
The article seems to imply that creating more housing will solve this problem. Such is not the case. "Homeless" is a euphemism. There are two types of street people: 1. Those who cannot take care of themselves. 2. Those who will not take care of themselves.
As a society, we should take care of the people who are unable to take care of themselves. I do not know how to define "take care", but it definitely should not include having schizophrenic episodes on the corner, intimidating panhandling, drug fueled benders, and shitting like animals on the city sidewalks.
One idea is to lock them up in an institution. This is expensive, arguably unfair, and creates an opportunity for abuse and corruption (one flew over the cuckoo's nest), and sets up a big liability - How long before violence or abuse causes a huge payout from the government?
For the others who _can_ take care of themselves but will not, they seem to me to be some combination of really bad choices and really bad luck, it is less clear to me what our responsibility to them is, and I wonder how much they can be helped. Consider Tap from the article. If he just wants to tap dance and get drunk all day, sleeping and shitting on the streets in my neighborhood, I am completely unsupportive. I will call the cops every time I find him passed out. Hopefully they will run him out of town. As much as he wants this lifestyle, it cannot make ends meet. He seems like a likable fellow during his stable periods, but I do not want to subsidize him.
If you don't want to make an honest living, you are going to have to break laws: dealing drugs, breaking car windows and stealing from them, stealing and selling bicycles. I have no tolerance for these layabouts and I cannot see why anyone else should either.
- lotsofmangos 12y agoYou really have no idea.
- room271 12y agoYour binary divide between worthy homeless and unworthy is simplistic. Why, for example, do some cities have far more homeless people than others. The high number of homeless people really struck me when I visited San Francisco a couple of years ago, and it's worth as a city asking why. For a wealthy place, it was incredibly sad and surprising too.
- pkaye 12y agoMild weather and tolerance/support of homelessness tends to draw more in.
- Terr_ 12y agoMinimally, though. Most of the people you'll encounter are locals.
- pkaye 12y agoHow do you know they are local? Based on statistics? What do you define as local? If they have been here for 5 years is it local?
- malandrew 12y agoI'd really like to see demographic statistics comparing the homeless from different cities. I'm especially interested in the mean/median distance a homeless person is from their home town (or at least the last town where they had a stable lifestyle.) I suspect SF has a greater number of homeless per capita that aren't from SF. The city is very supportive and I reckon that it is an ideal place to be homeless if you have some means to travel.
- cozzyd 12y agoIt's probably difficult for we educated, generally well-off people who procrastinate by reading Hacker News to empathize with the homeless. Perhaps you (I'm making assumptions here, but by you I really mean the streotypical reader of this site) know someone with drug issues or mental illness, but most likely, given the nature of the relations you're likely to have, they have a support system (health insurance that covers these things or family / friends with money) that provides access to treatment. We know people who have gotten fired or laid off, but they've been rich, connected, or skilled enough so that it can be overcome. Others are not so lucky and when those things happen, they end up on the streets. Once on the street, the potential barrier to getting off is not so easy to overcome. We like to think it can't be us, and for lots of us, we're lucky enough that that's true. There probably aren't too many homeless people on Hacker News to give the alternative perspective.
- vitriol83 12y agoempathy fail