Ok, get rid of them, now the streets are social crack houses? What are we to do now? Perhaps the woodchipper?
Addiction requires some level of coercive intervention to address. No one wants to admit this point so we keep arguing about whether we want to leave addicts to die in the street or in a crowded crack den. Neither really solves the problem.
Mark followed a bunch of homeless people in Skid Row as well as providing assistance to them and documenting it all through interviews.
The problem is so much (soooo much) deeper and worse than the surface level virtuous hand waving of "Just give them food and shelter and the problem is fixed".
I have family member suffering from extreme mental illness. He is likely on the streets somewhere, we don't know where because we had no choice but to abandon him to save ourselves. United States makes it extremely difficult to force treatment for someone who can't be making these decisions on their own ever. He ended up in this cycle. Mental Health Episode, Drugs, Law Enforcement interactions trying to get drugs (Robbing people), some minor help, slightly better, stops medications because side effects, repeat.
Funding it is always crazy expensive and in United States with crappy social safety net, it's really hard to find funding and politically, people don't want to fund it because "I'm barely affording rent and you want to raise my taxes to pay for them? Hell no."
That is correct, yet at the same time: Society as a whole refuses to give these people even the kindness of a roof over their head.
They need better care, yes. But if people won't even agree that these people shouldn't freeze to death in winter (or overheat in summer), talk of funding better care is off the table.
Christ, Fox News had one of their guys outright suggest they be euthanized. The bar for discourse on homelessness is in hell right now.
> The homelessness response system added 60,143 shelter beds in 2024, but with over 600,000 people entering homelessness for the first time each year, this is deeply inadequate.
> In 61 percent of states and territories, growth in demand outpaced growth in available beds, meaning that they had less capacity to shelter people in 2024 than in 2023.
I am not aware of any viable life option that doesn't involve the need to work a lot. Besides being born into a trust fund or being content with homelessness.
Based on how much people pay for even absolute shithole desert wasteland where I live, I can tell you there'd be a huge demand for homesteading federal BLM or other land if they'd reopen it. It would definitely help people who can't afford to get land on their own.
If we were living in pre-agrarian society you would either be on the "work treadmill" building/maintaining shelter and finding food or you would starve or freeze to death. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Do you think animals spend most of their time looking for food because they're also operating under the capitalist system?
It is my understanding that anthropology has shown that the people of prehistoric times cared for their sick, elderly, and infirm.
> "From the very earliest times, we can see evidence that people who were unable to function were helped, looked after and given what care was available."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/17/8788963...
[1] https://www.scielo.br/j/csp/a/kPn9cHW4RWKz94CjxDBw3ds/?forma...
This phrase is doing so much heavy lifting as to actively mislead people (i.e. lie with plausible deniability).
Take a subsistence farming community for example. If there aren't enough calories in the stockpile to feed everyone over the winter deficit they're gonna realize this in the fall and the less productive people will get their food rationed first and hardest and odds are some of the old (so like 50s) or otherwise infirm people who are in this huge calorie deficit are gonna keel over from a minor cold or something during the winter. The calorie math is what is and no amount of "well they cared for the elderly when times were good" misdirection is going to change the raw math of how frequently times were bad and the number of elderly, infirm, etc, that a society routinely subject to those sorts of "purge lite" events is going to be carrying at any one time.