Yes yes people don't always know what they need it can be complex. But the majority of homeless people I know and have known needed and wanted help, but were unable to accept the terms of the help offered by the state, or various charities.
I have been homeless and not some cute "living in my car for six months after college" but open sores untreated addiction rotting teeth in the subway station homeless. People I love are still out there dying those deaths and it hurts so so much to hear the way you talk about them in comments today. Not just this one either.
"These people" need anything but more carceral violence directed at them. I've spent time both in jail and institutionalized. Jail is worse but the difference is more a matter of degree than type.
What you want is to have them removed. You're entitled to your wants of course and even to pursue them. But don't use helping homeless people as part of your justification. It is very hard to read these comments and believe you have ever known or cared about someone who was homeless in your city.
This is a tautology. You are essentially defining the word "help" as whatever homeless people define help to be, yet you give some credence to the fact that homeless people might not actually know what is actually helpful for them. What is good for homeless people that are on drugs, that don't want to go to a homeless shelter, that don't want psychiatric help are very often bad for everyone else around them. So maybe we should stop making decisions that put the liberties of homeless people first.
In NYC where I live, two Asian women were killed by black, homeless men in this past month. I'm frankly not interested in making my language any more flowery for your taste with homeless people. I'm only interested in real policy solutions. Until you actually acknowledge the violence, the degeneration of our subway, streets, and city, then we're not going to be able to talk any further.
I'm quite confident that doubling down on going draconian on people who have no means to fix their own problems absolutely won't make anything better. If you take that far enough, the logical conclusion is something inane like "we should just shoot all homeless people" or something.
People have to be given a path back. Cutting them off will not magically cure what ails them.
I'm all for affordable housing. But when a homeless man commits murder, the answer to that isn't a one liner about the importance of affordable housing which is always the first and only thing that's mentioned when it comes to the homeless. There is nothing draconian about Kendra's Law by the way. It is far more humane to make sure treatment, psych beds are used, especially for people that do not have the capability of knowing when they need help.
I know a whole lot about homelessness and have left many comments on the subject over the years. If you want to have a meaty discussion about it, I'm capable of doing so, though this approach to engaging me isn't a good way to get that.
I write less about homelessness than I used to. These days, I try to focus on community development.
I think that's the best antidote we have and one that gets too little attention.
There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in. ― Desmond Tutu.
Some stats I pulled up: - Minimum wage in NYC is $15/hr, coming out to ~$30k/yr pre-tax @ 40hrs/week and 50 weeks/year, or $22,752 yearly after tax.
- At 30% of income rule for rent, that comes out to $568/month for rent. At 80 hrs/week that's ~$1k
- "The Bronx neighborhood of Bedford Park has the lowest median rent in the city—$1,558 for a one bedroom"
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something, but how is this not a problem of lack of affordable housing?
Those people exist. Not a huge number of them, but they have an outsized effect.
We used to have sanitariums, or locked folks up in jail if they got that bad. They suck, it's expensive, they are ripe for abuse.
But having random insane people wandering the streets accosting people, or in rare cases even murdering them, isn't working either.
I'm not interested in investing more of my time in crisis management for this problem space. I'm looking to find ways to actually shrink the problem.
I'm not saying we should stop doing any crisis management and I'm baffled that multiple people are reacting as if I had.
I'm saying one key piece is we need to resolve our housing supply issues. It's one piece. It's not a comprehensive solution but I think it's really important and far too many people seem to think lack of housing is somehow wholly unrelated to homelessness, which also baffles me.
I don't see how anyone can assert that but I run into pretty frequently.
Better housing will help some. Better accessible care will help some. Better other things will help some.
But there is no fall through default option here being exercised if those options don't help those who aren't helped enough by those options they stop being a repeated danger to themselves or others. In theory it's possible to still get committed. It's almost impossible to actually get committed (as in persistently kept away from society in a controlled institution), and those places are so underfunded and terrible, the street might actually produce better outcomes for everyone.
'Crisis management' is about taking a crisis and not making it a crisis anymore.
But it's generally about a short term emergency intervention, not about long term control of a situation that is fundamentally unstable, unsound, and not 'resolvable' due to a persons own actions. There are people who cannot and will not do what is necessary to stay sane. There are not a lot of them. But they do exist.
We can reduce the overall size of the problem through housing reform. But it doesn't remove the need for some kind of not-a-humanitarian-disaster institutionalization in a non trivial number of cases