some grapes of wrath shit, right here...

what do you do with a displaced population anyway?

What's "the libertarian solution", Feddy? (We all know what auntie sue's final solution would be like) How do you respond to the demonstrated point that it's cheaper to house/support people than it is to leave them on the street?



Cities Are Spending More to Brutalize Homeless People Than It Would Cost to House Them
BY
LUKE SAVAGE
Few scenes are as emblematic of the barbarism of American capitalism as the now-routine “sweeps” in which police round up homeless people and destroy their belongings. By some estimates, it would be cheaper to just provide them with housing.

particular scene, at once horrifying and grotesque, has become increasingly common to America’s major cities: with the blessing of municipal authorities, a phalanx of police stormtroopers descends on a concentration of homeless residents before dispersing them and destroying their belongings. In the years since the 2008 financial crisis — one not incidentally rooted in a Wall Street–driven collapse of the housing market — the number of homeless encampments across the country has dramatically increased, and authorities have responded in kind with escalating brutality.

Fueling the growth of encampments has (unsurprisingly) been a sharp increase in homelessness — itself driven by soaring rents and a chronically inadequate supply of affordable housing. According to one analysis from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, a single 5 percent increase in rents in a major city such as Los Angeles can force as many as two thousand people onto the streets. The same study found that the number of encampments nationwide rose some 1,342 percent between 2007 and 2017. Given the measurable increase in homelessness since, there’s every reason to believe the figure is even higher today.

In the wake of these developments, big city mayors and councils have leaned heavily on draconian law and order approaches that aim less to address the root causes of homelessness than the visibility of those experiencing it. Police raids on homeless encampments, usually called “sweeps,” often pair raw brutality with a dollop of paternalism as authorities insist (almost always erroneously) that evicted residents have subsequently been sheltered or placed in transitional housing.

As Eugene Stroman, a homeless resident of Houston explained in 2017, those living in encampments often have very good reasons to prefer encampments and refuse police offers of relocation to a shelter:

Contrary to what authorities claim, encampment sweeps have therefore done little except make life even harsher for the unhoused. Evidence is scant that encampments can actually be linked to increases in crime but, as Malcolm Harris observed last year, the homeless often serve as a convenient scapegoat for officials who would rather outsource social policy to bloated police departments than build public housing.

There is considerable evidence, however, that cities are in fact spending far more on criminalizing and displacing homeless people than it would cost to provide them with a place to live. The likes of sweeps, incarceration, enforcement of anti-panhandling laws, and hostile architecture, after all, come with a hefty price tag estimated to be more than $31,000 per person, per year. The annual cost of providing supportive housing, according to the same analysis, is $10,051 — or less than a third the cost of criminalization.

There is, in other words, nothing rational about the way America’s cities are opting to respond to homelessness. The hostile posture of local governments and police departments toward the unhoused reflects neither reason nor ineffective policymaking, but instead the disproportionate influence of affluent property owners on elected officials, the noxious reliance on policing as a panacea for social ills, a public policy consensus that continues to view housing more as a vehicle for speculative investment than a basic human need, and the wider hollowing out of America’s social contract all of this entails.

As the richest country in the world, America has at its disposal the resources and know-how to see every person housed and afforded the necessities of life. Allowing it to be otherwise is, quite simply, a choice.

Yes, but you see, this awful behavior proves some sort of philosophical point to a God of cruelty.
Just like it's not enough to be straight, you have to perform homophobia; it's not enough to be successful in life, you have to perform cruelty on the unsuccessful.
It's a display to both Cruelty-God, and the tribe.
Failing your cruelty performances gets you thrown out of the tribe.
Then you're the homeless person.
American social hierarchy rests on a constantly unraveling and re-weaving web of paranoia, fear, cruelty, and self-loathing.

I agree that police sweeps are definitely not the solution.

But homelessness is a very complicated problem. It's not just about supplying lodging to homeless persons. I'm not even going to pretend that I'm expert in this area, but that math in the article posted by @Spaceturkey comes from an inherently biased source to begin with. For example, it doesn't differentiate between arrests of homeless people just for being homeless and homeless people who may have stabbed or robbed someone.

It's also an extremely political hot potato, which is why we probably won't see any progress anytime soon.

Aren't there a lot of infrastructure projects that need to be done? If they need housing, they can earn their keep. Aren't most cities in the US. run by liberals who refused to do anything about the homeless population years ago? Yeah, they made their bed, they can sleep in it.

Cruelty-God smiles upon you.
You get a free masturbation tonight.

How is it cruel to ask someone to work for a living?

Some of 'em are going to able bodied, sure, but what about the children, the elderly, the mentally ill, the handicapped..
"Oh well, sucks to be them!" right?

Put the children into foster homes and/or boarding schools. Find reputable charities and churches that can house and feed the elderly. Place the mentally ill into mental facilities or rehabs that can would eventually lead to halfway houses that would teach them how to function in society. The handicapped people that can work should work. The ones that can't work, again, find charities and churches who specialize in these kind of things. Hell, you could probably team up with local universities and two year colleges that would provide volunteers or interns that could help with these projects.

We tried that, but Reagan tore it all down, and the Repugs all went "Yaaayyyyy!! Yaaaayy!! Fucking yay!! Fucking yay!!! ".
And they've never taken those cheers back.

My niece is in one in Florida. I don’t know if it’s private or public, but she’s been paying for it through Medicaid. Maybe do something like that. Maybe provide tax incentives for private facilities. No Malibu resort, but something to keep them safe and will provide basic care. Then get them into a jobs program.

Yes, had to throw that in to keep the tribe happy.

and when there are a) no jobs for them
and/or

b) they are for whatever reason incapable of working?

The US is capable of feeding and housing every single person in the country. The "richest country in the world" has some of the most glaringly hateful policies towards the poor. This is a country built by capitalists for capitalists, and when I say capitalists, I'm not talking the Karen who thinks that because she has a little money saved in the bank, and a nice house on a nice street that she's a capitalist. I'm talking about the actual capitalists, the wealthy landowners who move millions and billions of dollars every day, all in the name of profit: Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Charles Koch, and so on. The people who make certain that government policy always benefits them at the expense of millions of lives in the US, and billions of lives around the world.

We deserve better than that in this country. This is a solvable problem.

then there's also the fact that the majority of a city's homeless population aren't from the city...

If you got time to lean, you got time to clean. There's always work to be done. If they are incapable of working, then they get placed in the appropriate facility.

that's not what I asked

If any boss told me "if you've got time you lean, you've got time to clean," I will put ex-lax in their chili, and puncture the tires on their cars. Anyone who says that stupid fucking saying deserves their face smashed into a brick wall repeatedly until their teeth come out their asshole.

Not a lot of work in the restaurant business? Granted, I haven't heard anyone say that in a while, but I've sure as shit heard it a handful of times, if not more.

Then be more clear.

Other problems are that housing has curfews, won't accept a bunch of mangy pets, and won't let you do drugs or prostitute on the premises.

I mean we could start by not restricting how much housing can be built beyond what eg earthquake and fire safety require. California of all places is FINALLY doing this, forcing cities to plan minimums of additional units, or risk losing their building approval authority entirely if the state isn’t satisfied with that plan.

I'm actually all in favour of government jobs programs that mean anyone who is able and willing to work can do so. Of course it doesn't make sense to limit those programs to just the homeless, it's far better if they can avoid getting to that point.

@Bill Carson sounds like you're proposing something similar to the America Works program from House of Cards? If so, do you have a proposal for how to deal with the fact that job markets rely on there being some level of unemployment and reducing that to zero would add inflationary pressure?

how could those two options not have been more clear???

No I would not limit it to the homeless, I've often said we should have a program like this for illegal immigrants in exchange for citizenship and in exchange for healthcare. I don't think my idea would reduce unemployment to zero, but I'm sure some people could go into the military.

once again, you don't know a damn thing, do you?


We're talkin about shelters, not housing. Housing is pretty autonomous with maybe weekly visits from a support worker and a trustee involved.


How do you justify a curfew for a place that has 24 hour reception anyways? Factor in that a lot of cash jobs residents might access are overnight shifts... restaurant cleaning and the like.

I'd think even for you expecting someone to give up their dog to access a place to sleep would be too much. Kinda justifies why someone wouldn't give up an encampment space for a shelter cot though, eh?

Most of the shelters here actually do have supervised sites now. It was more practical than the custodians having to find dead ODs in the bathrooms and cost effective than calling ambulances out to deal with corpses.

Pretty sure nobody turns tricks at a shelter... sets up outcalls, sure. We got all kinds and qualities of 'ho at work.

Military requires a minimum of a high school diploma, plus you have to take an armed services academic test.
How many homeless people do you figure have a diploma or GED?

we had somehting like that about 15 years ago for temporary workers.

unfortunately there were loopholes that allowed for them to be paid less than minimum wage and other abuses, and at the expense of those formerly minimum wage jobs.

these days? you'd be mind blown how many have post secondary.
a bad couple of weeks can destroy someone for years now.

Bootstraps!! Lazy!!

not to take away from the folks I've experienced who's parents say, tossed them out on the street or literally into a fire... but yeah, renovictions have multiplied the mid years cohort hugely. THese are folks who have paid their bills on time for 20 years, but then a landlord gets an equity loan and they get 90 days notice. Laissez faire que cera response aside, it's fucking up the ecosystem.