Ok, give the homeless homes and don't complain about homeless shelters in your upscale neighborhood. Reform police, there are major american cities with protests and minimal violence.
You complain about symptoms with no regard for the root cause.
You complain about symptoms with no regard for the root cause.
But for the majority, who have mental illness and/or substance abuse issues, a shelter or home often makes little difference.
Witness for example the experiment in Manhattan to provide some homeless men with hotel rooms. They literally go downstairs to poop in the street, harass or attack passersby, and trash the hotel. There's not a one-size-fits-all solution to homelessness.
What we really need is restoration of residential mental care facilities that were largely torn down in the 1970s in favor of mainstreaming the mentally ill.
We also need some kind of analog to the old rooming house districts where men down on their luck could get a bed and a hot meal for a dollar or so.
What we don't need is the status quo which is ripping apart the social fabric of our society.
I'm afraid also that Finland's socio-economic situation is rather different from that of the U.S. Up until quite recently, they have had a homogeneous culture, a much smaller population, and more social stability, versus the U.S. with its vast and highly diverse population and relative instability. I don't see how a Finnish solution would quite fit our situation, though we should of course study their methodology since they tend to have good ideas :)
It does though. Cities like Philadelphia and states like Utah solve it this way and both the homeless per capita + the return-to-homeless rate are nationally very low:
Together with our many nonprofit partners, the City provides 11,503 emergency, temporary and permanent “beds.” Last year we helped 970 families and individuals from-homeless-to-housed. Our permanent housing programs have an average 90% success rate in preventing a return to homelessness.
http://philadelphiaofficeofhomelessservices.org/know-homeles...
IMO, the SF public sees the right to disturb others as an extension of personal liberties, and hence this solution won't work very well.
I mean you'd think people would be excited about homeless people pooping in their free housing instead of on the sidewalk.
> But for the majority, who have mental illness and/or substance abuse issues, a shelter or home often makes little difference.
I'd question your stats about mental illness and substance misuse disorder, but even if we accept that most homeless people are either mentally ill, or addicted, or both: how do you expect them to engage with treatment when they're living on the street?
"Homes first" is a key part of many homeless health programmes. See this example, called "housing first": https://hfe.homeless.org.uk/about-housing-first
> is restoration of residential mental care facilities that were largely torn down in the 1970s in favor of mainstreaming the mentally ill.
We really really don't need to go back to the days of asylums that held people for many years for relatively mild mental ill health.
The numbers are also very low, around 10k 'chronics' for the entire bay area as far as I remember.
You need different solutions for different types. The poor / down on their luck types are definitely helped by free housing.
But everyone can move to somewhere functional.
Moving to a city that already has a functioning society is something one person can do without permission. So people do.
They all have something wrong with them, but only SF has it's unique set of problems.
So everyone has to figure out what tradeoff works for them.
To me the biggest flaw in SF is the institutionalized Nimby-ocracy and the resulting housing and homelessness crisis, which I think poisons most areas of society.
Texas seems like it has that side of society figured out. It has other serious problems, I know.
I mention all that to be very clear about what I mean when I say, I wouldn’t agree to live near a San Francisco homeless shelter either. I just can’t tolerate people screaming at me all the time or scattering used needles on the sidewalk outside, and definitely couldn’t ask friends or family to tolerate it.
San Francisco just happens to attract more homeless for various reasons.