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xnyan

Even in the best case, homeless shelters have serious downsides (to put it mildly) that you may not have considered.

-Have a pet? Not coming with you. A stint at the pound, likely followed by euthanization due to overcrowding.

-How about a family? If you can even get into a shelter, odds are it's going to be male or women and children.

-Shelters are often unsafe and filled with people who have untreated problems. Violence is a real risk.

-Very little space for personal possessions, high incidence of theft.

>Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions.

I would strongly encourage you to volunteer at a homeless shelter. Not only do they need the help, you'll learn that while drugs are restricted at the shelter, it's a fantastic place to meet people who use drugs and find new sources of drugs.

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> Shelters are often unsafe and filled with people who have untreated problems. Violence is a real risk.

I've always found it a bit ironic when people intending to advocate for better treatment of the homeless proclaim that homeless shelters are havens of violence, full of dangerous people with drug and mental health problems.

> I've always found it a bit ironic when people intending to advocate for better treatment of the homeless proclaim that homeless shelters are havens of violence

This is the equivalent of suggesting that there is irony in the position that one can support animal welfare but still be against the position of beating animals with a stick (rather than an iron bar).

Homeless shelters can be violent. They are certainly full of people with (often untreated) mental illnesses. They are also not a solution to homelessness, but rather a solution to the problem of people sleeping on the street.

Solutions to homelessness often require providing permanent housing to people whom you may not like and who you, personally, may believe do not deserve a "free" apartment or house. It involves giving people a permanent foundation on which they can start to build a post-homelessness life. This is why it is never a popular solution - what I find ironic is that voters who want to "solve" homelessness never actually start with the simplest solution, giving away secure and dignified housing.

A real solution involves notions of security, safety, etc and often requires homeless people, particularly those who have lived homeless for a long time, to unlearn those strategies they have employed in order to survive. Shelters do not provide this type of support.

People are too shy to say it but I think a lot of them would prefer a much more violent solution to the problem. I mean, what other answer could there even be, if you don't like the status quo and also don't think homeless people should be offered housing? That's the dark secret behind a lot of these debates where people's positions otherwise seem nonsensical, I think.

Agree. A related dark position that a not-insignificant number of people hold is that it's actually necessary and perhaps beneficial to have a visible homeless class living in unnecessarily cruel conditions as a means of coercion to keep working no matter how terrible your job is.

I suppose it makes sense from a certain perspective, but I think the lack of a safety net is a costly economic mistake. Take bankruptcy as an example, you can take risks and if something goes wrong (including bad decisions), you are not necessarily ruined forever because we allow you to walk away from some or all of the debt.

There's a cost to allowing bankruptcy, but I think it's worth it even though I've had to "pay" (indirectly) for other's bad decisions. I think about all the value lost to society because we make the danger of not having a job, even for a short time, very high for most members of society.

The technical term for the phenomenon you've identified is the "reserve army of labor."

> I've always found it a bit ironic when people intending to advocate for better treatment of the homeless proclaim that homeless shelters are havens of violence, full of dangerous people with drug and mental health problems.

Homeless shelters typically lack privacy and security from other residents (something most, even high density, regular housing does not lack for very good reasons). So, even if dangerous people were no more common in the homeless population than the general population, the small number of them would drive others out of shelters, and they'd become super concentrated there.

And advocates for better treatment of the homeless tend to acknowledge the greater incidence of serious drug and mental health problems in the population as something services need to address.

So, where is the irony?

> you'll learn that while drugs are restricted at the shelter, it's a fantastic place to meet people who use drugs and find new sources of drugs

Is this not also a problem at homeless encampments?

Making it illegal to be homeless means outside encampments too.

No it doesn’t. People already sell drugs outside of homeless encampments. Making it illegal to be homeless changes nothing.

Making it illegal to be homeless means making it illegal to be homeless. Not just in encampments.

They said homeless shelters have a lot of drug activity. You implied encampments do too. What was your point if it wasn't about encampments?

Their point was about drug activity being a problem in shelters relative to encampments.

Your comments about making homelessness illegal seem like a non-sequitur.

foxpurple proposed making homelessness illegal and forcing everyone into shelters. They didn't mention encampments. The strongest plausible interpretation of what they said is outside encampments too.

xnyan explained problems with shelters relative to unspecified alternatives. They didn't mention encampments either. The comment they replied to didn't mention encampments. And you pointed out some of their points don't make sense if they were just comparing to encampments. The strongest plausible interpretation of what they said is they weren't just comparing to encampments.

The strongest plausible interpretation is that the comments haven’t randomly thrown away the context of the conversation.

This entire conversation is about the dangers of encampments, and how to solve that problem.

Also you haven’t explained how your comment isn’t a non-seqitur. As far I can see it is an out of context contradiction that doesn’t change anything about the meaning of anything.

>Even in the best case, homeless shelters have serious downsides (to put it mildly) that you may not have considered.

I have considered it, and I don't care. I live in one of these high homeless cities, and it's horrid. No one who hasn't lived in a place like this can really understand the decay that a lot of homeless inflict upon a city and upon social cohesion. I am leaving as soon as possible. The lives and cities of productive members of society do not deserve to be ruined by homeless people. Go to the shelter or go to jail. Camping on the sidewalk or in the park should not be an option. I don't care if the shelter sucks, that still doesn't give you the right to camp in the park. I don't care if the park sucks either, that doesn't give you the right to camp in my back yard, which has actually happened and the police declined to remove the person.

If we have to sacrifice a few people who are overwhelmingly drug addicted or mentally ill or just unintelligent to make our lives and cities orders of magnitude better, sorry, but I'm voting for that option.

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