I don't know why but this seems to be the primary psychic barrier to doing this thing we know works and which can in some cases even be cheaper than services first aid.
Everything else is bad for real estate investors.
I've often been obliged to pay for something I've seen others acquire freely and I say good for them. I wouldn't exchange places with them for a moment. It seems the pettiest of all things to begrudge someone whose life is a disater, even in the rare cases when it is of their own making.
I'm concerned about outcomes. Let's stop for a minute and assume that I'm an unfeeling, non-empathetic person who doesn't care about anyone but himself. Even then, I would advocate to allocate more money to homeless services, regardless of how that money is used, because doing so would benefit me: I don't want to see human feces on the sidewalk, or used syringes, or disease-carrying rats running around near tent encampments, or mentally-ill people screaming at me as I walk by.
People who adopt the attitude that we shouldn't give people a generous safety net because they haven't done anything to "deserve" a handout are quite simply cutting off their noses to spite their faces. They're making their lives actively worse just to "teach a lesson" to those "undeserving" homeless people.
If you want clean streets, ban vagrancy and street living.
You can’t save everyone. Savior complex is self serving. At some point, you have to cut damaging/damaged people lose.
The sanctimonious savior complex is frankly nauseating ..especially when it achieves nothing but create noise that is pleasing only to the one practicing the virtue-signaling sounds.
I attended al-anon meetings for three months to support a friend and continued going to them because I found it helpful to understand the effect addiction(of all kinds) has on the normal people around them. We have to be kind. Yes. But we are not our ‘brothers’ keepers’, as it were.. we need social boundaries when it comes to taking over the burden of those over whom/whose actions we have no control.
The last US election showed us that there are a LOT of these kind of people.
Most of them call themselves religious, too.
(paraphrasing Steinbeck)
Really? Should be fairly easy to understand, for a Middle Class Family that is living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to save for retirement, the kids collage fund, maybe help pay for a aging parent, save for home repair, and provide daily expenses seeing a good chunk of their earnings being stolen errr "taxed" away from them, money that they could use to provide for their own needs is a large part of it.
That doesn't mean it's going super great. There are still a lot of people on the streets, obviously, and depending on where you look, either it's getting worse, or at best it's like they're treading water.
But it turns out combating homeless is just expensive, even though arguably it can be cheaper than just doing nothing (taxpayers end up paying for those 911 calls and unpaid emergency room visits after all), but there are a lot of people who have an aversion to "just giving away money to people who don't deserve it". They'd rather pay to clean up after a homeless person, year after year, than pay to make that person not homeless, even if the latter would cost less. So funding is hard to fight for, and funding levels are never enough to fix things.
San Francisco's allocation for this is a single-digit percentage of the city budget (your assertion that their budget is "huge" is incorrect; here it's a few hundred million on a $5B budget), and yet it is one of the biggest, most obviously visible problems the city is facing. Sure, simply throwing more money at a problem doesn't make it go away, but insufficient funding -- as is currently the case -- is going to ensure the problem remains.
And what is overlooked/unrealized is not just the missing data (that which exists, but is not perceived by the individual), but also all the "forces" at play, like complex causation, individual preferences (many of which are highly illogical), behind the scenes string-pulling, randomness/chaos, and so forth and so on.
If we could somehow find a way to get even a few people to realize (and honestly acknowledge) that we all live within a complex, interconnected and interactive system, full of uncertainty and illusion, could we perhaps start to come up with some solutions that take this complexity into consideration (and therefore are more resistant to being derailed by simple rhetoric and propaganda)?
While yes it is cheaper in some ways, the problem is people will be less likely to be creative or lean on personal support networks (i.e couch surfing, live with family, etc) if the government through the taxpayer will just hand you a key to an apartment no questions asked....
There were a couple of times we were technically homeless as a child, I slept many nights on the floor of my grandparents home, or an uncle, etc. so I am not unsympathetic to being in this condition. However I also do not believe government handouts are a solution to the problem
I believe in Handups, but not handouts.
There are a lot of poor people who work very hard to provide for their family. I don't know what should we do for them.
I'm tired of hearing how people think it will go. Pre-critics and naysayers. I want action, drastic action that has never been done before to solve problems that have never been solved before. Offer a solution or go back to work.