Bonyduck Campersang
Odd lookin duck
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These people have neither heart nor mind. Absolute reptilians (though I suppose even reptiles have minds)
Housing, Homelessness and Poverty
- Thread starter Bonyduck Campersang
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These people have neither heart nor mind. Absolute reptilians (though I suppose even reptiles have minds)
Everyone complains about homeless people but no one has an actual solution beyond "make them go away".
Bonyduck Campersang
Odd lookin duck
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For them, that's the 'solution'
Gori the Grey
The Poster
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Matthew 25:35 offers one possible solution.
Homelessness has multiple, different segments that each have different pathways for solving. Drug addicted, lost their job, mothers with children, mentally ill, want to live on the street, etc. all have to be solved differently. There is no one size fits all.
Farm Boy
I hope you dance
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The Judgement of God doesn't play well with the Gospel of Wealth?
I mean, how are we to be saved if there aren't enough homeless to go around for each of us?
Is this when Peter tells Jesus that he'll never leave him?
Gori the Grey
The Poster
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Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody poor.
I'd probably start by putting them into houses tbh
This is a revolutionary concept. Revolutions are not allowed.
Easier said than done. If Albuquerque has 1500 homeless, where are you going to build 1500 homes or apartments? What exactly do you build for a homeless person? On whose land? Who is going to build them? Who maintains them? Does anyone get the free housing who asks? Very often the problem (faced by the homeless person) is not lack of a house, but something else. No home is often a secondary effect effect.
But it makes other problems harder to fix if you have nowhere to live.
but by definition one of the problem a homeless person faces is not having a house
IMHO it's hard to fathom that the "main issue" a homeless person faces, whether that's drug addiction or mental illness or domestic abuse or not having income, can be effectively dealt with while that person does not have secure shelter.
The rest is triage and logistics. Different demos of homeless people have different needs, so you'd build (or buy) a different mix of housing. It may be different in New Mexico, but government agencies can hold land and build things on it where I live, or they can contract it out to a private consortium to do it for three times the cost as they do with every other infrastructure project here.
There will, inevitably, a minority of really difficult cases with complex traumas who end back up on the streets who someone can readily point to and say 'see? you can't solve homelessness by giving people houses!' That's fine. We've identified the particular cohort of homeless people who cannot be helped by having houses given to them, so do something different. What that is will depend on your preferred level of authoritarianism, but that would be a different discussion to 'should we give homeless people housing'.
EgonSpengler
Deity
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This was the thinking for a long time, but the social-science tide has been turning the last few years. After years of attempting to tackle the presumed causes of homelessness first, with minimal results, a lot of places are trying a new "housing first" approach. Get people into a place, and then address their mental health, substance abuse, unemployment, or whatever. I think it's too early to know whether this approach works better, but it will inevitably be stymied by the lack of housing. Here in Eastern Massachusetts, there's a waiting list for emergency housing, even when they prioritize families with children.
The Atlantic said:
And of course the housing problem is becoming acute and front-page news practically everywhere. In the US, close to 16% of people spend half their income just on housing. Spending 1/3rd of your income on housing is enough to be called "cost-burdened"*, of which something like 50% of renters and 20% of homeowners count. Only yesterday or the day before, I was reading about a guy who has a full-time food service job and no place to live, in Scotland (I can't remember which city). Our modern societies have become such that merely contributing to the economy isn't enough to grant you permission to live in it.The Atlantic said:
So, yeah, I tend to think that homelessness is a housing problem, which of course can be complicated by other issues, just like anything else. But we would be making progress if people with severe mental illnesses were the only ones struggling to find housing.
* I don't really know what "cost-burdened" means, exactly, or who decided it was 1/3rd of income, but that's the metric I've read.
sophie
Break My Heart
Important to remember that “here is a home for free with no strings attached” and “here is a home. no pets, no partners, no kids, no drugs, we will be surveiling you 24/7, you must enter a drug program, among 25 other kafkaesque hoops you must jump through every day to prove to us you’re worthy of our Hooverville-tier apartment or we throw you out on your ass and bring the full weight of our police state upon you”
Are categorically different propositions. What boomers usually mean when they repeat the adage “some people like/want to be homeless” or “we tried giving them housing and it didn’t work” is in reality, “we offered homeless people barely functional housing with a bunch of conditions that aren’t workable or acceptable for real people with lives, while treating them as literal human garbage the whole time, and they had the temerity to balk at our largesse!”
Like just as a point, if you had to choose between living in a tent on the street but you get to keep your dog of 9 years that has kept you going all that time, or a ramshackle apartment and the government takes your dog away, yeah, people are going to take the fudging tent. Wouldn’t you?
Are categorically different propositions. What boomers usually mean when they repeat the adage “some people like/want to be homeless” or “we tried giving them housing and it didn’t work” is in reality, “we offered homeless people barely functional housing with a bunch of conditions that aren’t workable or acceptable for real people with lives, while treating them as literal human garbage the whole time, and they had the temerity to balk at our largesse!”
Like just as a point, if you had to choose between living in a tent on the street but you get to keep your dog of 9 years that has kept you going all that time, or a ramshackle apartment and the government takes your dog away, yeah, people are going to take the fudging tent. Wouldn’t you?
Lexicus
Deity
Actually "house them" is the obvious solution
Synobun
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Barely functional is very accurate. Social housing in Vancouver, which is where the homeless, addicted, and disabled get put once they run out of any other options, is usually comprised of a half dozen up to a dozen rooms per floor with a shared kitchen and often even a shared bathroom. Your room is essentially exactly that, a room, with what amounts to a cot and maybe a tiny desk. No social supports in the building either, even if you could get past the fact that you're sharing a kitchen and bathroom with 6+ other people who have all collectively been abandoned and forced into a corner by the government. Most of the buildings are in abject disrepair as well, and not due to damages by the tenants; the government usually buys old, decrepit buildings that are no longer suitable for private profit and then converts them into cages for the poor.
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
And sometimes the "Housing" is infested with rats, cockroaches and bedbugs
Homelessness is a product of multiple forces that have roots in poverty. Poverty is not a simple thing and can include: housing, transportation, personal support, language, childcare, organizational support, in addition to mental health issues, drug problems, health problems, abuse problems, and no money.
To get out of poverty there are stages: Crisis > intervention > stabilization > fixing basic issues > training > jobs > cliff effect > out of poverty!
A given person can enter the poverty cycle at any point even if most begin with a crisis. Some can even skip steps. In the US relief agencies tend to focus on fixing one particular place on the cycle. To get out of poverty a person has to move through to the end of the cycle. Typically, people will have to change agencies as they make progress, often having to start over with new social workers and helpers. Transitions can be difficult.
Housing tends to fall into the stabilization and fixing basic issues phases. Giving everyone a “house” is not easy or cheap. They do not magically appear. Building an apartment complex can easily take a year or more.
Most poverty/housing solutions are fragmented and uncoordinated; treating most people as if their situations were all the same. A better approach would involve a two part framework that oversees the distinct local efforts. First, the homeless population is segmented into appropriate groups of similar situations. Second, each person in each group is assigned a guiding agent to manage that person’s journey through the various steps to ensure smooth transitions and help to prevent lapses. Guiding agents would have multiple clients.
The problem though is currently huge and building such a program is challenging. So, the best path is choose one segment at a time to implement. Say, single women with kids. The guiding agent steps in for crisis intervention and then, over time, carries the mother through all the steps using the local resources as needed. Typically, there will be bottlenecks at different points in each community. These are the places where poor people can easily fall apart and backslide into another crisis. If you need 1500 new homes for people in a community and no one is building them, for whatever reason, your homeless problem will never go away. If you community does not have any job training, then finding jobs for the recently housed won’t happen.
The goal is not giving everyone a house. It is enabling them to take care of themselves for the long haul.
To get out of poverty there are stages: Crisis > intervention > stabilization > fixing basic issues > training > jobs > cliff effect > out of poverty!
A given person can enter the poverty cycle at any point even if most begin with a crisis. Some can even skip steps. In the US relief agencies tend to focus on fixing one particular place on the cycle. To get out of poverty a person has to move through to the end of the cycle. Typically, people will have to change agencies as they make progress, often having to start over with new social workers and helpers. Transitions can be difficult.
Housing tends to fall into the stabilization and fixing basic issues phases. Giving everyone a “house” is not easy or cheap. They do not magically appear. Building an apartment complex can easily take a year or more.
Most poverty/housing solutions are fragmented and uncoordinated; treating most people as if their situations were all the same. A better approach would involve a two part framework that oversees the distinct local efforts. First, the homeless population is segmented into appropriate groups of similar situations. Second, each person in each group is assigned a guiding agent to manage that person’s journey through the various steps to ensure smooth transitions and help to prevent lapses. Guiding agents would have multiple clients.
The problem though is currently huge and building such a program is challenging. So, the best path is choose one segment at a time to implement. Say, single women with kids. The guiding agent steps in for crisis intervention and then, over time, carries the mother through all the steps using the local resources as needed. Typically, there will be bottlenecks at different points in each community. These are the places where poor people can easily fall apart and backslide into another crisis. If you need 1500 new homes for people in a community and no one is building them, for whatever reason, your homeless problem will never go away. If you community does not have any job training, then finding jobs for the recently housed won’t happen.
The goal is not giving everyone a house. It is enabling them to take care of themselves for the long haul.
