I don’t know what the solution is but it isn’t the status quo. A lot of the west coast cities are having a disproportionate problem with homeless. It’s not clear if people are bussing their homeless or the housing prices or what.
The amount of trash generated by these homeless camps is nuts and ruins virtually every public space. In Portland, it is common to find hypodermic needles littered in the parks. You’ll walk past people on the sidewalk passed out with a needle in their arm or actively doing drugs. Human excrement on the sidewalk. I wish I had some solution but the current situation sucks for everyone.
I’m with you that that is inappropriate in public, and west coast cities are being hit super hard. The dirt little secret is that many interior cities do also run their homeless out.
But the research shows the fastest, most sure fire way to reduce the problem is to just give folks a permanent address that is safe.
Every effort should be made to give these folks a home, even if that home is some sort of rapid mass manufacture box with a door that locks.
I do acknowledge that the states on the west coast shouldn’t be the only ones that need to follow that approach, and there clearly isn’t a solution for that. I.e. a state should be rapidly obligated to house IT’S homeless, not ALL OF AMERICA’S homeless… But that is a very complicated layer
A studio apartment can be over $3,000 in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, there are like five homeless people on every block of the city I lived in with five-digit population. The city would need to find some way to seize land, without calling for a vote, in order to have enough housing for everyone since rent control has been voted against for over a decade.
The main issue is that people would vote to drive the homeless into the sea before they would vote to house them.
You either give them homes or you line them up and shoot them. Those are the only two options.
Though if bullets are too expensive you can just gas them and then cremate them, which might be a more efficient Final Solution to The Homeless Question.
American eugenics sought to solve poverty by forcibly sterilizing the poor. The only reason it fell out of favor was the great depression when suddenly people who were once employed decided that maybe this wasn’t fair now that they were about to be sterilized.
Which ties back in nicely to WW2, I unfortunately have to give some of the lawyers at the nunumberg trials praise for arguing “How can America sit in judgement of Nazi concentration camps when eugenics has been established legal by the Supreme Court?”
Anyways, economic eugenics is coming back in fashion thanks to NIMBYs that just can’t stand to see the results of treating the basics to life as commodities.
I’m sure they’re terribly appreciative of you referring to them as “unhoused” so you can feel just a tiny bit morally superior to those that just call them homeless 😂
I think bums deserve respect and kindness from all of us. A lot of the time bums suffer from mental health issues caused by shame and trauma and that needs to be addressed with care and humility. These are human beings and how we treat our most vulnerable is a greater reflection of how we treat each other as a society. We need to help bums not only out of kindness but out of respect for society and ourselves as a whole.
The freedom promised by the constitution rang hollow on every enslaved person, every native, and every woman and every other marginalized group when it was written, and it still rings rather hollow now.
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