It's not just the free fare - it's the abysmal lack of shelter options and the attempts by cities to criminalize encampments and force people to find somewhere indoors to avoid arrest.
Curious how someone could have most helped you at that time in your life if you don't mind sharing.
It's hard to fix every cause of homelessness, but providing shelters is pretty easy.
* nobody wants a shelter built near them * even if it does get built, it's often women/children only
and the second bullet point isn't (afaik...) just sexism or anything, it's just picking risk categories. Consider all the following like you were an insurance company trying to appraise how costly it is to do business with a group of people: Apparently homeless men are, collectively, more expensive to shelter than women/children because they're plagued by more expensive issues - more violence, more drug issues, etc. So homeless shelters frequently can't afford to operate if they try to shelter men. So it becomes an issue of "women/children only" or "it's literally too expensive to safely run the (both-genders) shelter to be feasible".
When I approached He asked for change, which I didn't have, so I asked if he wanted the remaining half of my sandwich and iced coffee instead. The sheer joy of his reaction as he took the sandwich and coffee is something I'll always remember.
The way in which you wrote this could be misinterpreted, so any clarification would be welcome: did you then or do you now feel as though someone is obligated to help you? If so, who and in what ways?
Want to make sure this part of the comment is also highlighted because big homeless shelters can be really difficult, scary, and even dangerous places, even when there are beds available, and so unhoused people have to wrestle with whether it's safer/more desirable to sleep outside rather than deal with all that. And that's not to mention all the cumbersome rules and religious proselytizing they might have to deal with in shelters. Warehousing people is not a good option.
https://www.npr.org/2019/12/16/788435163/supreme-court-wont-...
The problem isn't the criminalizing of sleeping in public spaces, it's the lack of publicly funded shelters and publicly funded (incl. mental) healthcare for the homeless.
We should pay to give them a place to sleep, and punish them just like anyone else if they choose to set up camps in public spaces.
Good luck with the former. The NIMBYs will fight it tooth and nail, every millimeter of the way.
Shelters without forced religious services. Without forced NA/AA. Shelters that will allow families to stay together. Shelters that don't take away walkers and oxygen tanks due to being "weapons". Shelters that are safe, for everyone, especially if you are trans. Ones that allow folks to actually improve their life instead of waiting hours for food and mandatory classes. Bonus points if they provide for pets as well: I know of at least one woman that stayed with an abusive partner because of this. Her only friend in the country (!) was her dog. (He died while she was pregnant, so she got a better life, but no dog).
It is unfortunate that the shelters we do have are rarely good enough.
I don't think society is at a place to do such a thing, but I'd personally like to see everyone getting the option of low-cost to free basic housing. A single person would minimally get a private room and bathroom: More likely a proper studio with a small kitchen. Clean, secure, and functional. Easy-to-clean and easy-to-replace surfaces and appliances. Professional cleaning 2-4 times a year, mandatory.
Of course, I think we should only have shelters for folks that have temporary emergencies and homes for everyone else. People will still need shelter from time to time even in a more perfect world - fires, floods, abuse, money mistakes, and so on happen.
This is all a dream and I don't think we'll get to this point soon enough.
The homeless that are on the street are typically very hostile and going through drug withdrawal. It can become a public safety issue then.
[1]: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/10-facts-homelessness-2014
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
Often applicable, but rarely quite so literally.
A little empathy would clarify that if there were any (holistically) better option, then homeless people would be preferring that to sleeping on the streets.
Firstly there needs to be "enough" available shelter, which accommodates the richly varied life situations of people. Secondly, it's no use having these shelters in the middle of nowhere such that their tenants are disconnected from a thriving economy and the rest of society.
The commons are, after all, for common use, and it is coercive to punish the homeless (often considered "riff raff") for "ruining the commons" if one's delicate (bourgeois) sensibilities are affected.
Don't most people feel the same about this issue? What systemic problem is preventing a huge mass of people who agree on this from making a meaningful change happen?
The truth is a lot of the homeless people that aren't in shelters choose not to go to shelters. Why? The biggest reason is because shelters don't allow drugs or alcohol, and if you're an addict that's an immediate pass.
There are other reasons too. Sometimes couples want shelter together, but most are separated by gender (and for good reason: to prevent sexual assaults). Sometimes a person has a pet, and pets are generally not accepted at shelters.
So, what do you do? Allow people to shoot up in a shelter? Or deny heroin addicts shelter? As I said, it's not obvious how to fix this. It's definitely not just a "build more beds" situation in most cities.
By stopping people at the first step, you make it a lot harder to provide the second (safe use) and third (use reduction).
Nitpick: I don't like to use the term "homeless people", because it puts homeless first and the emphasis on them as a fixed group of people. They're just people who at this time have housing insecurity, and I think this framing means we can solve it by providing people with safety and security and resources.
They're homeless, trying to hide that reality with a non-sense PC euphemism doesn't change that. This attitude isn't helping, it's obfuscating and bad. They're not housing insecure, short people aren't height-challenged, disabled people aren't differently-abled.
Jobless homeless are easy to solve and is generally a transient condition, it's extremely dangerous period of their lives but most people will recover in a small number of years with the right support structures - the mentally disabled without support structures are a permanent problem and we just need to provide funding for permanent support workers for them - lastly, addicts are heavily ostracized but their condition is potentially recoverable - still, addiction treatment is a multi-year or decade process and addicts need solid support structures including a stable living situation to dig their way out.
So more beds won't help, the funding going into care is pathetic and it has constant exponential costs on society - more drug users on the streets today means even more tomorrow as more people fall into that cycle. I think legalization of the softer drugs would help, we've done it with MJ up here in Canada and we have yet to devolve into a lawless anarchy, but I really don't know about things like heroin or meth.
Is there some way we can organize a discussion about practical solutions to this issue, and then pick that and tell the politicians to go do it?
I'm not saying our current solutions are good by the way, which seems to be what some people replying are interpreting my comment as.
I'm personally in favor of just state funded small apartments, where yes, if they want to shoot up, let them shoot up.
Socialized housing is absolutely the answer, but homelessness will never be solved until we stop treating housing as an investment. Housing increasing in value is also housing increasing in cost. Investment growth is diametrically opposed to affordability.
Interesting. Question: do you think that if all of a sudden a wand was waved and everyone homeless in a given city/geography was magically housed that there would still be (eventually, over time) further homelessness or do you think that homelessness would cease to exist from that point forward? What do you think would happen in say, 5-10-15 years out?
When a city is more hospitable to the homeless, it attracts more homeless. The homeless problem in California's major cities is in part due to their their (relatively) accommodating treatment of the homeless.
Cities, even states, aren't ever going to be able to fully tackle this problem alone - there needs to be a massive initiative at the federal level.
What would that look like to you?
The single best thing governments could do is increase density in areas with high economic opportunity. This can also be done very easily with a few strokes of the pen: Higher density zoning, and a land value tax.
Land value tax is critical as it ensures that landowners must develop their land rather than simply rent-seek if they are lucky enough to own in a desirable and growing area.
> So, what do you do? Allow people to shoot up in a shelter?
And the answer is yes, obviously. Safe-injection sites and opiate maintenance programs work.
And you also go several steps further by ending drug prohibition entirely. Prohibition has created an environment where the only opioid drugs available are highly concentrated and easy to smuggle, just as alcohol prohibition converted a nation of beer and wine drinkers to whiskey addicts. With raw plant forms of coca and poppy available, we'll see far fewer people shooting up heroin or smoking crack (just as we see today in places where cultivation and consumption of these plants is commonplace).
Few people, including other guests, want to deal with these and the safety issues and so fewer come (including the volunteers).
This discussion is about the former: is it a good idea to have safe injection or maintenance facilities at or near shelters? The consequences you are describing sound to me like symptoms of the latter, which are not widely described at actual safe injection or maintenance sites.
The problem with simple solutions is that many people don't want to do what you think they should do. They don't want safe injection, they want their hit now. They want to drink until they pass out. They want the freedom to make bad choices.
Build better shelters.
But more than that: You can require certain things, like not being violent with other folks. That they clean up their own messes. Provide mental and physical health care at the shelter and offer medical help in weaning off drugs. This won't work in an environment that isn't safe and secure, for both the person and their stuff.
More unpopularly: Require that they shoot up in the proper location, where there are sharps boxes and so on. Get treatment for folks or employ trained staff to help folks shoot up (if you can't help folks stop, we can do it as safely as possible).
You’re saying it good when the gov’t raises taxes to pay for outreach to the homeless, but then spends the money on something else, like a new stadium?
The degree to which reality diverges from this prescription is the degree to which the politicians fear either a) a declining bushiness environment or b) riots
Care to explain your logic around this statement?
allowing encampments won't probably solve that unless they somehow provide heat?