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Comment by purpleblue | Hacker News Reader

This is good. We need more of this, especially in California. The idea that we just let mentally ill people out on the street is not "freedom". It's disgusting and creates danger for them and for others. We need to hospitalize mentally ill people and force them to take medication if they are unwilling.

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>This is good. We need more of this,

I want you to say this after you stayed a week in one of these hospitals. You do not care about us, you care about seeing us.

You want us to be forced to take medications? Which ones? The ones that don't work of the one that give us heart diseases, tardive dyskinesia, and also do not work?

It disgusting? You know what is disgusting? The way people make the mentally ill homeless because they want to rent an AirBnB or have two or threee houses or got house rich with 2% mortgages and created the homelessness problem.

Mentally ill people are not homeless because of Airbnb or capitalism. Mentally ill people are homeless because they are MENTALLY ILL. 99% of homeless people are either drug addicts or mentally ill, and they need help, even if we have to force it upon then. It's not freedom to be living on the streets in piles of your own shit. It's inhumane that we as a society just abandon them because we are afraid to force people to get better and it's even worse that formerly honorable institutions such as the ACLU prevent these people from getting the help they need. We need MORE forced help of mentally ill people, not less.

Eh. Y'all are both shouting past each other with zero nuance.

We cannot say housing/Airbnb is not an issue entirely. On most nights, I have three houses within 100ft of me that are empty because they are short rentals near the city center. I wonder if there are a few people who would like to live in those homes if they could?

But yes too, many are mentally ill and some need more than just a bed.

The Airbnb argument does not hold water. Would someone love to live for free in a vacant Airbnb? Yes. Almost everyone would. So let's then give everyone free housing forever, what are we, capitalist pigs?

In aggregate, Airbnb pushes real estate prices upward. If we didn't have them, and the utility of dwellings was limited to its use as primary home, more people could afford housing. As it stands, the people with more money earn more money.

I didn't suggest squatting is a solution. You punched your own straw man.

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