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Comment by 0x0nyandesu | Hacker News Reader

If people on HN really want the urban life style to make any sense in America they need to start tackling the mental health / homeless problem.

They talk about "the environment" but no one wants to talk about how my wife has to dodge human feces getting on and off public transportation.

"It's just part of living in a vibrant city".... Give me a break.

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Seattle just elected more moderate candidates willing to tackle the homeless problem seriously [0]. We've never made it to the levels of bad described here, but we were headed there. Possibly stories from our CA neighbors spooked us (many transfer up here.)

It's unhealthy to escape to be where "your tribe" is. I love my city and I did feel represented with moderate voices winning this election cycle.

[0] https://compassionseattle.org/

It's part of living in a broken city.

Your city (and country) does not need to have a massive homeless problem. This is something the city and state government can fix. Housing, mental health support, drug treatment support and better community policing are all possible, and proven to work.

How to get the city and state (and national) governments to fix this problem is another issue.

Ah yes blame the "city" and not the various municipalities sending their homeless to said city. Most of the homeless are not from the cities they are in. They just end up there and then the city has to pay for it for some reason.

We’ve created the lawless environment that attracted them to our cities. They weren’t coerced to come here, we enticed them to come here.

I've lived in a major us east coast city up until the pandemic. My tax dollars kept going down the drain dealing with homeless who by in large were not originally city residents. Your opinion that these people were enticed to the city is wholly unfounded and totally made up. Just another reason I've mentally checked out of the debate. Y'all have fun with that. I'll live in the burbs.

Your comment isn’t coherent. The homeless haven’t been forced into the cities. They chose to go there and the cities chose to welcome them.

I don't entirely blame the city government, though that does have some responsibility, the rest lies with the State and national government.

If the homeless people got the support and resources (eg, healthcare, a secure job, and a reasonably priced place to live) they needed somewhere they were familiar with, far fewer would be leaving to head to a city to try and survive.

This is just not true. Everyone is talking about the homeless problem all the time. NOBODY is happy about the homeless situation in our major cities.

I don't know a single city, liberal, moderate, or conservative, that has solved it.

I am just a single citizen, I pay out the ass for taxes, and nothing is being done to help these people.

At this point is appears there is no political will to do anything. Instead everyone walks in circles while funneling the money into porkbarrel spending, the police force, and roads.

Housing First seemed to be working in Utah. They achieved 90% reduction in chronic homelessness.

A remarkably simple and cost-effective answer. Essentially it states “get people housing and then it’s way easier to treat the things making them homeless” plop someone in a home and then it’s easier to get medication to them and they stop showing up in the ER 4x a month. Get people housing and then you know where they are to check in on how dependency treatment is going. Psychiatric condition? Way easier to treat if they have a roof, heat, an address to send medication. It is actually cheaper than just doing nothing and allowing people to remain homeless.

But then they stopped funding it in 2015. “Man this remarkable looking approach stopped working!” “Oh? When?” “Right after we stopped funding it!” “Huh, weird.”

I was about to chime in with the same comment. In actuality, they landed around 71%, but yeah, I'd still call that a huge success. https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2020/05/11/utah-was-onc...

The arguments for housing-first homeless solutions align neatly with Universal Basic Income.

The other 29% need to be sent to a re-education camp until they want to be part of society again. I'm not kidding. Vagrancy is a plague on civil society.

Cities are just police departments that happen to provide some other services

That's not Chicago, maybe West Coast or Austin, but Chicago got super aggressive about homeless in the 90s when gentrification started. Then, the homeless use to die under the freeways every winter and Wacker Drive (the "lower drive" as seen in The Dark Knight) was a giant homeless camp.

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