Perfect example of ineffectual Democratic policy lost in theory. Richest state in the country with the biggest homeless problem. The governor and the mayors trading insults, but neither of them willing to grasp the issue with tough love. It’s a drug abuse and mental health issue, not a housing affordability issue. You have to take possession of these people and force them into treatment or nothing will change. Getting worse, not better.
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Your evidence for this is what?
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Having met many of them, as I live in California. They beg on the street for money for drugs and alcohol when so many establishments are looking for workers. It’s as obvious as the nose on your face, but researchers and politicians just want to make points that fit in with their agenda. It’s pathetic.
That’s why anecdote is such a bad way to understand the world.
I get why they are attractive, but when they tell you something that is in contrast to the conclusions of experts who have performed systematic investigation I cannot get my head around reconciling that conflict by concluding the experts are wrong. What would it take you to take a step back and instead conclude “maybe the limits of my personal experience is insufficient to understand this complex problem”?
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With thirty anecdotes you already have a data set. I have hundreds. To say that housing costs have nothing to do with homelessness is also not correct. You do see people here living in old motor homes. There is a spot of road near the Tesla factory where they are all lined up. Not sure if such people count in the statistics of the homeless. We have 600K homeless in California at last estimate. It certainly was nothing like this when I moved here seventeen years ago, and housing costs were quite high then. In fact, they’ve always been among the highest in the nation, so not sure we can point to that as the root cause.
Now we see little tent communities springing up on the interstate in places far from the costly housing, like Stockton, for example. They’re living on the American River in Sacramento. While some may end up as transitionally homeless (in other words redeemable back to a “normal life”) many many of them are on an alternative lifestyle where they’ve abrogated any responsibility for improving their own condition.
Read the article I posted. Tens of billions spent. No impact at all. In fact, the homeless population continues to grow. I certainly agree we should do something about it, but any solution which does not require something of the people getting the aid will continue to fail.
This guy 
Beggars belief he’s in with a legitimate shout of winning that election. A ‘Martian welcoming, werewolf loving vampire hater that has no faith in the wall around his house and a dog that doesn’t bite’.
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The US Senate , the ‘greatest deliberative body in the world.’ 
imagine a world where you can never hit bottom. even if you decide to never work another day in your life, you’ll always be able to collect the dole/welfare cheque and in cases of extreme temps even be supplied shelter. For free. All you have to do is “exist”, you have zero incentive to leave this state if you aren’t motivated to.
This is the problem here. the goverment is already hugely subsidizing the addiction problem via methadone clinics and safe injection sites. on average, approx 175 people a MONTH die of overdose here. the downtown east side of Vancouver is a fucking war zone and nobody can figure out a solution while the zone gets bigger and bigger. used to be one or two city blocks, now the poorest postal code is 20-30 square blocks of tents on sidewalks and shuttered businesses with garbage piled up everywhere. fucking state, it is. and less than 2km away, condos are being sold for $1000/sqft+
shit is fucked up.
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Social welfare isn’t the problem. It exists in Scandinavia without the problems you describe. Those problems occur in countries without a social safety net too.
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Check this madness out.
correct. however, it there are no other active programs to pathway people out of that cycle then they’re going to have a hard time finding their way out on their own
addiction is a nasty disease.
Heartbreaking video above, thanks for sharing.
It reminded me of some sort of bad zombie film, but these are real people. So sad to see. So many people hunched over, or walking around in a stupor, or sitting down on the sidewalk, nowhere to go, nothing to do, getting high, riding it out.
I haven’t got a clue what the answer is, but it is heartbreaking to see.
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Agree with this. The question is should a society allow people to live in that way? Whatever are the causes, the West Coast of the U.S. (and it sounds like British Columbia, perhaps) have taken a very permissive attitude toward allowing homeless encampments. At least in California, such settlements are growing. Does a society have a right to temporarily take away someone’s freedom in order to force them to learn (or relearn) to live in a way more compatible with the society’s values? This is the question at the heart of it, I think.
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Looks like a rich society that doesn’t care!
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It’s a tough one to call though. When people have descended so far into the abyss of addiction , and their drugs of choice are so unbelievably powerful , i.e. fentanyl , meth , heroin , there really is an infintessimally small chance that they can be rehabilitated or convinced to change their lifestyles. It’s also worth keeping in mind that for , a lot of them , what would seem like an apparent hell to the rest of us , is actually preferable to them than their lives before. Here , for a few hours at least , they are able to find respite from the unbearableness of reality. The grim truth is that for the vast majority this is the last staging post before their inevitable demise.
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If its their choice to homeless then respect their choice.
If its something that has been forced upon them by circumstance then they deserve sympathy and assistance.
Try and help them or leave them alone. The idea homeless people should be locked up or “reeducated” is just because of our own shame in looking at them.
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I used to work as a recruiter and have tried to get homeless people work a few times. Without a fixed address, bank account, social security card and formal identification its really hard.
Maybe you can walk into a Burger King and get a job there without too much fuss, I’m not sure, but certainly the businesses I have worked with wouldn’t even consider someone without those four basics and many homeless people won’t have at least one or two of them.
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Yes, any support for homeless and/or other groups with complex needs should include help with obtaining all the above.
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It’s a thoroughly shit way to live. Isn’t the bigger question what has gone wrong with society that results in this being the road that is taken? The point that is seemingly not appreciated is how much of a precarious position being on the bottom rung of the economic ladder is.
Sweeting addressed the issue of how housing challenges affect work prospects, but it also works the other way in ways that compound - losing your job and becoming delinquent on your rent will make you part of a class of people who cannot get housing because they have no job and cannot a job because they have no housing. Secondary to that, people do not seem to appreciate how many people in the US are fully employed but still sitting on that bottom rung of the ladder literally only set back away from become part of that class of pseudo unemployable people. You can look at the stories of employers complaining about no one wanting to work, but if you don understand how the system works to keep people out of employment and housing once they become challenged then you’re not going to understand the extent of the homelessness problem that is represented by people who do not want to live like that and want better for themselves.
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This also puts that scenario into perspective
Rent has simply outpaced salary in many parts of the country. The housing opportunities available to people who are working a full time minimum wage job are very limited. People need to earn often 2 to 3 times minimum wage to afford even below median level housing, and our economy is set up in a way that a large percentage of the job dont come anywhere near to that.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition’s (NLIHC’s) annual Out of Reach report found Americans working a full-time job at the applicable federal, state, or local minimum wage in the United States cannot afford the estimated rent for two-bedroom modest housing at fair market value (FMR) in any state, metropolitan area, or county in 2022.
Nationwide, in only 274 out of 3,000 counties can a full-time minimum wage worker earning $25.25 an hour on average affords a decent one-bedroom, according to NLIHC’s data. In 2021, full-time workers must earn $24.90 per hour for a two-bedroom and $20.40 per hour for a one-bedroom.
Note, while some states have higher minimum wages, federal minimum wage is $7.25
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