Just throwing more money at the problem would have helped, but certainly wouldn’t have solved the problem.
I worked at an emergency homeless shelter for a while, long ago, and saw the same kind of thing you talk about. I'm not sure it was quite as deliberate, but you can absolutely set someone up in a perfectly nice free apartment and they'll still somehow find themselves back on the street in short order.
Now, that's not everyone! Not by a long shot. You're absolutely right that throwing money by itself is not going to eliminate homelessness, but throwing some money would probably take a good-sized chunk out of it.
Yeah, we were a safety-net hospital across the street from a prison. We got a lot of inmates, had a locked wing on most floors for prisoner patients, many many uninsured illegal immigrants, etc. We had quite a few patients that should have gone home, but we couldn’t safely discharge them, so we were just their free hotel while they hung in social support limbo - we were owned by the county, so taxes paid for their stay, and they were in no rush to leave.
It was very much a case of seeing how most failed social policy ultimately ends up in the hospitals.
Working in wealthier hospitals is way more fun. Treating disease is much more satisfying than “treating” poverty.
Given how expensive medical care can be, doesn't this indicate that perhaps our current system is more expensive to society as a whole? (I mean, there are other factors, but given that the cost of health care is something that even more 'well off' people care about, perhaps it is a better angle to push for discussion and reform?)
It is not at all clear that "most homeless people have mental problems" because it is not at all clear how many people are homeless. There are many people who are couch surfing around friends places with no actual home of their own. They are homeless, but they don't necessarily count amongst the homeless figures. They are also completely mentally competent. They may also outnumber the official homeless, but we don't really know.
To be clear I'm not implying this is everyone, or that money wouldn't help, but it's complicated.
The CBC followed this one homeless man for a while in Toronto, he was given a $1200/month basement apartment for free. After a few months, he walked out, choosing to live on the street (in wintertime no less!). He complained that the carpets were 'dingy and musty and disgusting'. Now it wasn't really apparent if they were or not, but literally as he's saying this, the camera pans to the shelf where there are about 40 empty 'tall boy' beer cans.
I could only think that since he's not really doing anything all day, he could probably work out a deal with the landlord to remove the carpets if they were really that bad, or else, file a material complaint if they were, but it honestly didn't seem like it was an especially negative situation to begin with.
Also, it seemed that the homeless man was very cantankerous and antagonistic.
So just consider that nugget: 'carpets not nice enough for me so Ima rough it' is the logic employed here.
I mean, possibly the carpets were toxic, but I doubt it, moreover, any other reasonable person would find a way to fix the problem considering the 'glorious' opportunity of having quite a nice little flat in one of the more expensive parts of the country for free. But it ends up in argumentation, aggression, complications, and literally 'back on the street', by choice.
I wonder to what the degree of anti-social behavior is learned or is an adaption of 'street life' or if these types were always like that, and if som, does an excessive degree of anti-social behavior count as 'mental illness'. There's a really interesting degree of hyper-libertarianism going on there as well, that 'street life' at least implies a kind of 'absolute freedom' with no rules, no clocks, no responsibilities of any kind, no concept of social order etc..
There are some studies that delineate between the 'temporary and long-term homeless', it might be that it's really important to nab people as they are just descending into this darkness before all of those ugly social features start to encroach upon someone's identity and they don't come back from the mouth of madness.