Inequality isn't the correct term. It's poverty, drug abuse and mental illness. Poverty still isn't a green light to commit crimes though. There are plenty of places to seek help legally. Crime is as much a cultural problem as anything else.
The issue with the chronically homeless who make up the other 20% is that they refuse the help because they don't want to follow rules such as curfews and no drugs & alcohol. The main reason for this is that most of them suffer from mental illness. This is a medical issue.
Also, the US is incapable of even reproducing itself, which falls far short of my definition of "works."
>they will not give their consent in the majority of cases for the same reasons that they refuse help from government programs and non-profits.
...because of the underlying mental illness.
Do you really believe that you can get consent from this group of people who you say should be in medical facilities, when they have self-sorted into that group mostly by being too unwilling or unable to conform to any rules or structures?
A lot of that is exactly for the reason the previous comment points out: mental health issues that unhoused people refuse to get treated. As someone who now works in that field, that person is correct. There is no way for case managers to "make" them get help. If the person is having a non-violent incident, then no one can really assist unless the person wants help. Even in some violent cases, police and PETs (Psychiatric Emergency Teams) can't help.
I work with the unhoused in LA, a city with one of the highest unhoused population counts. There is very little we can do if the people don't want help, which is a bigger majority than you assume. We also have a housing shortage for people that can afford rent, let alone landlords willing to help the unhoused. You make it sound easy, but it seems to me, you actually have no real experience in the field, which may be fine. But don't say a system isn't working when the services system can't help those that really need it.
Sure, maybe the US government can do more. They provide a lot of our funding and we also get a lot of assistance from private donors. But at this point it's yelling into the wind. Without fully supportive communities and government assistance, we're really moving nowhere. And it isn't just some shortcomings of the government. It's also private property NIMBY types that don't want services in their area. Example: our main office is in the Venice/Santa Monica area. We have rules and regulations brought upon by local NIMBYs on what time we can be there, who can be there, what services we can provide, and more. So while we help the unhoused in that area, we have offices elsewhere that some clients can't make it to, which reduces the assistance they are able to receive.
So while it's easy to say "it isn't working", how hard has everyone else really tried? I don't see many people quitting their dev jobs to make 1/2, sometimes 1/4 of the wage to do a more strenuous job. The only reason I did is because the agency I now work for also helped me when I was on the streets and they're willing to pay me more because of my lived experience. I still do web dev and IT stuff on the side to make up some of the wages I lost transitioning, but it was somewhat difficult to adjust to.
So, what are your experiences helping the unhoused?
How have you been able to help those around you?
How were you able to help those that refused?
Do you have a contact list of agencies that may help theunhoused? If so, can we collaborate so hopefully more people can get assistance? Well, maybe not, since you're probably in a different part of the world than me, but here's a starting point for the LA area: https://www.lahsa.org/get-help. Also on that site is a careers page that has a full listing of agencies in the different SPAs in LA county.
But if you know of national agencies that can assist the unhoused population, please, let me know. We are in dire need of real assistance, not empty words.
Edit: spelling
Grassroots movements start at a local area and grow, particularly where government doesnt help. What have you done besides make an excuse for taking action? Do you really think that being a random person complaining on the internet is actually helping the people you say need help?
I noticed you didn't answer any of my questions. Just filled space with empty words.
Again, I ask, what have you done to help unhoused people? Besides finding excuses why it won't happen, then complaining nothing gets done.
What you don't seem to understand is sitting around comfy and cozy in your residence complaining about stuff doesn't actually solve anything.
What needs to happen is individuals, such as yourself, actually need to try and help the unhoused instead of crying that the government doesn't do enough or that people as a whole will never make it happen.
How much of your life has actually been spent assist8ng others instead of being cynical and doubting? How many excuses have you made up in order to not help? I get that complaining on the internet is "cool" nowadays, but with society growing larger, we need more people to help instead of crying and whining about every step of the process (see my previous comment about NIMBYs). But everyone just wants to complain and be seen as someone who cares instead of actually doing it.
So again, what have you done to help? Because being upset nothing/not enough is being done and finding excuses to not do anything is quite frankly, useless.
I don't really do anything, other than giving food and whatever else the food pantry people ask for. I guess I theoretically try to improve the homeless vet problem, before they're vets...
Not to say this is a non-issue (it's hugely important), but it seems a bit odd in a context where Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Sub-Saharan Africa (plus a few central Asian and South American nations) hadn't really been invoked
Just curious where you think those last 3 things stem from.
Drug abuse and mental illness are much more prevalent in those worst off economically. Poverty (in developed countries) is almost always a result of inequality due to bad policies (lack of social safety nets).
> Crime is as much a cultural problem as anything else.
Right, part of crime is cultural, and part is economic. But culture is also determined by lack of access to economic opportunities.
If the first half of your statement is true, then why do the billions of people subsisting on a few dollars a day around the world do not have society-wide problems with drug abuse and mental illness? Or are you implying that this causation only happens in developed countries?
What can you do to refute the idea that instead of drug abuse and mental illness being caused poverty, the same factors that predispose one to drug abuse and mental illness also predispose one to poverty?
> culture is also determined by lack of access to economic opportunities
Similarly, it's rather the other way around; lack of access to economic opportunities is caused by a culture that values human capital less. Of course, the two compound over time; but history is empirically full of examples of minority cultural groups that were discriminated against (whether legally, socially, or otherwise) but nevertheless succeeded economically due to the culture placing a high value on human capital[0].
[0]: Sowell, T. Discrimination and Disparities.
As stupid as the idea that inequality in itself causes these problems is, it doesn't have trouble explaining why this would only happen in developed countries.
Historic levels of inequality, including urban "anyone can easily see that their downstairs neighbor is a hundred times richer than they are" inequality, were much greater than modern ones and involved a lot less social pathology; maybe look in that direction.
> What can you do to refute the idea that instead of drug abuse and mental illness being caused poverty, the same factors that predispose one to drug abuse and mental illness also predispose one to poverty?
Looking for a root cause seems unnecessary for this question; mental illness can easily just cause poverty directly.
That one is absolutely not true.
"Social pathology" is way too undefined a term for me to argue with.
For example, we generally take Forbes as an authority on who's rich, but really rich people tend to be excluded from consideration, because Forbes can only measure certain kinds of wealth, and even when people's wealth mostly exists in that form, it can be hard to see.
Don't confuse a convenience metric with actual inequality.
I'm struggling to understand this one. Are you talking about the times of the cavemen, when I suppose everyone was equally materially poor? And yet you had other kinds of inequality back then, such as a bigger and stronger caveman being able to kill you and take your stuff, since there wasn't such a thing as a society or rule of law to protect you.
Or are you referring to the vast majority of people who for the vast majority of recorded history who lived in systems that elevated certain bloodlines above others, legally and culturally, and sometimes even to the status of gods? Certainly you cannot claim that, say, Queen Victoria and the common Englishman were more equal than King Charles is to his average subject, in every possible way.
What the fuck are you even talking about?
Is a society just if people with drug abuse, mental illness, and general dysfunction have equality of outcomes?
Of course, this simplistic debate belies the fact that all of these attributes have multifactorial causes, and most are in cyclical feedback with each other.
Dysfunction begets poverty begets dysfunction. No single intervention is socially curative outside of storybook logic.
Getting on my podium, I think that these factors are worse in developed societies than poor one (which often have greater inequality) for numerous reasons:
First would be the visibility of inequality. Next would be culture of material consumption. Next would be breakdown of social community (and the efficacy of social norms).
I think this explains why this types of behaviors are seen more in places like the US, which has a longstanding culture of materialism and individualism. I think it also explains why the behavior is more pronounced for outgroups and fractured broken communities.
This further explains why some groups within the US with strong social community have relatively low crime rates despite very poor economic conditions
They don't live in societies with extreme inequality and precarity. Under capitalism, inequality is the problem, not merely poverty.
...relative to others with less of that; hence an inequality.
Inequality is absolutely the correct term. The rich wield their means to exploit the poor. Without the rich, the poor are not exploited and poverty, drug abuse, and mental illness all decline. Every. Single. Time.