> I can tell you without a doubt that there is no natural system in place for homeless to get out of that rut
What would such a system look like?
EDIT: Totally serious question. To build something, you must first architect it.
What would such a system look like?
EDIT: Totally serious question. To build something, you must first architect it.
As Utah found, just giving homeless people a home, without demanding any substantial money or qualification or whatever from them for it, reduced the number of long-time homeless by a huge percentage and in the process saved net money for the state because of reduced medical and policing costs.
http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic...
This is one step, but it's not a silver bullet. New York City has had a similar program for a long time, and it's actually come under fire from homeless advocacy groups for being ineffective (while simultaneously expensive).
New York City also poses a greater challenge than Salt Lake City for a number of reasons, but so does San Francisco, so solving SF's homelessness problem will require more than just building more housing and giving it to homeless people, even if that's ultimately one step of the solution.
From the perspective of wanting to do the most good with our limited resources, paying for housing in SF or NYC, let alone SLC, is probably pretty stupid.
There's a guy I know who runs a business employing homeless. His rule is he never fires anyone. He understands that without a home/transportation, it can be impossible to make it to work. That gives them one stable leg to try and build the rest of their life from.
Just out of curiosity: what about reasons unrelated to absenteeism, like some sort of gross misconduct, drug or alcohol abuse on the job, untenable behavioural or psychiatric issues stemming from that, etc?
For example, one guy had HUGE anger management issues. When it came to blows for the xth time, the manager pulled him aside, and said "I'm not going to fire you. I don't fire people. But you can only come back here when I've gotten a call from a counseling professional (he gave a number of one) and they tell me you've been through a successful treatment." It took six months, but he got the call and the guy came back to working. Apparently been one of the best employees ever since.
I have no idea where to start if one accepts the current political, legal, and cultural environment as-is. Assuming you did just accept the status quo as a given, I can better appreciate why the idea of 'just giving homeless people housing' is so enticing. [And there is evidence that it works well. I'm skeptical about the long-run costs and skewed incentives, especially in places in which lots of people want to live.]
Here's a great post about this by a blogger I really like on this topic:
- [Spring In The Silicon Favela – Granola Shotgun](https://granolashotgun.com/2016/02/08/spring-in-the-silicon-...)
But on the plus side, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do once you stop playing by the rules!
We need to allow homeless to sleep in their vechicles, if said parking allows overnight parking.
We need to build Kibbutz's. (Or just give them a field to pitch a tent? A outhouse? Anything?
We need to stop making homelessness a crime. Every homeless person I know is camping illegially. They get tickets. They can't pay tickets. Tickets turn into felonies. It's just wrong.
If Jesus appeared, he would be ticketed for a multitude of municipal/criminal violations in a matter of days?
I don't think it's necessary tho to allow free camping in government run (and government owned) parks necessarily. Maybe it would be sufficient to just allow, or not prohibit, someone from renting spots on their property for otherwise homeless people to pitch tents.
It'd also be amazing if someone could figure out how to do an end run around all the laws and regulations that make housing so expensive and time-consuming to build. Where's the 'Uber for housing'? Very likely there is none; housing is too easy to 'attack' as it's most useful when its stationary.
Or maybe that's it – maybe someone could offer 'Japanese coffin-style hotel rooms' in a bus that just slowly drives around a city.
This. Outlawing "flophouses" throughout the United States exacerbated homelessness, made it much harder for people on the margins to improve their material circumstances, and grossly distorted the housing and rental market by removing the lower end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flophouse#Cage_hotels_in_the_U...
I think a lot of barriers just come from the social stigma of actually being homeless. So thinking reasonably, showers, laundry, snacks or meals? A place where one could feel human and a part of the naturally accepted society again.
hot showers
books, movies, wifi that you can use while you're there
soup on tap
vending machines with healthy options
exercise machines
Sounds like a brilliant idea that would benefit homeless people, those in marginal situations where it's not always safe to go home, and so-called "normals" all at once, thus serving everyone so as to prevent a stigma caused by their use.
I do blog a bit in hopes of helping other homeless people find viable solutions and bootstrap themselves. http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/
I have a second blog with very little content where I try to talk about What Helps The Homeless: http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/
A far, far better approach is to work on a) providing more senior and student housing -- aka affordable housing, but aimed at single people and childless couples and not marketed as "affordable" because that means "Built for poor people!" and that is always a terrible idea b) promoting walkable communities and c) helping people who can't fit a "regular" job to find a means to support themselves with some kind of paid work (freelance, part time, whatever).
Homeless people are just people. Once they get off the street, they are again simply referred to as people. You wind up homeless when your problems outrun your ability to cope. The difference between a homeless person and person in housing can be as little as one more problem or one less resource. Some particular thread snaps, it all comes unraveled. Trying to reverse that after the fact is a lot harder than trying to prevent it from happening to begin with (aka "A stitch in time saves nine").
But most people don't really want to hear that. Building more affordable housing (or otherwise trying to make society work better for ordinary people) doesn't feel heroic enough. It doesn't have the same rush of adrenaline of talking about getting people off the street after their lives have gone to hell.