Yes. Give homeless people a real home and jobs, otherwise they camp on your doorstep?
Winter, mostly.
That won’t work. Homeless people can’t hold down/don’t want a job, or are by circumstance unemployable (I.e. they smell bad and don’t have daily access to showers), you have to figure out what to tell the IRS as to withholding, refund, etc.
You’d think giving them a place to stay would help, but it turns out they never maintain the place because there is little incentive to. See every public housing unit ever.
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Mostly they just drove the homeless out of Manhattan. You can still find them in the other boroughs iirc.
Didn’t you read all the thread before quoting that crap.
I really hate it when poeple quote shit without finishing the whole topic and seeing where the conversation actually went.
I’m with Hougan here, it’s worse in England, The governement 20 years ago started giving money and housing to people with no jobs etc and even more money for those that had kids, more kids equals more money. We now have 3 million odd who don’t work, dont contribute anything have never worked yet have a house, benefits and all mod cons including too many kids running wild and repeating teh same things their mum did, while us saddos pay our taxes so they can have some of them.
There are lots of people who will take advantage of charity and abuse it readily. All support needs to be focused in the correct way rather than just a broad stroke that hopes to cover all needs which will in fact just lead to it being abused.
Also it would be interesting to see how all of us would feel to have homeless people in cars living in our street, peeing in the road and generally stinking out the area. It’s easy to be holier than holy when it doesn’t really affect you.
Well at least they generally don’t live very long. Or something.
And all those 3 million on welfare, single mothers etc, probably they would all be homeless if the state didn’t give them the basics? Now that really would stink up the place (nationwide!). In the usa they have huge deserts/empty spaces to drive all the ‘failures’. We don’t have that luxury in the uk.
Statistically the homeless mostly come from certain life events and backgrounds (child abuse/run aways/social care programs/drug addiction etc), so i agree with Houngan that one of the best ways to fight the issue is to deal with those issues as soon as possible. That requires money as well but that is what living in a society is all about (rather than growing/hunting all your own food and making all your own clothes and energy etc), you stick together to make things better for as many people as possible, so you pay your taxes.
Heathen! Speak not against the central creed of the modern liberal!
This is why the welfare reform of the 1990s totally failed, right? None of those people got jobs!
And don’t forget what ever it was (an american thing) after the great depression! That never happened because all people want to be lay about spongers, and only fear keeps them in line.
Let me understand this, you maintain the above to be true yet you also espouse the following:
All of those conflicting notions must make it unpleasant in there!
What’s the conflict? The homeless are not remotely unemployable. 40% of them are families with children. Only 22% have “severe mental illness.” Plenty of them could become “normal” people again given resources, support, treatment, and jobs.
The welfare reform of the 1990s as implemented was harsh and unpleasantly done in my opinion, but that’s because I’m a guarenteed minimum income guy and the socialist. The net effect was that if you try to get people jobs, they mostly do. “The homeless are incapable of getting jobs” is the same thing you heard about welfare recipients in the 1990s, and it wasn’t true.
Everyone has this homeless stereotype of “crazy drunk single guy”, but single men aren’t even a majority of the population.
The conflict was between the idea that “In incentive terms, no one can tell me with a straight face that making being poor more unpleasant makes people less poor” and "The welfare reform of the 1990s as implemented was harsh " and that “This is why the welfare reform of the 1990s totally failed, right? None of those people got jobs!” (which implies to me that they became ‘less poor’, maybe you don’t agree).
As to the statistics on homeless they really depend upon the definitions used to create the categories (as is common in these cases). My guess would be, and I’m just not nearly sufficiently interested to do the research, that the definitions were stretched beyond what the ‘normal man/woman on the downtown street’ would consider homeless.
People working downtown will report that the overwhelming majority of (what look like) homeless are somewhat-dysfunctional-men.
Edit: Hey! I just remembered. One of my best friends was homeless! He counts against the stats (“12 million adults in U.S. currently are or have been homeless at some point in their lives”)! However, and he would agree (well not at the time, he knows how to argue in his own self interest), he did not deserve one red cent of support. He also fits the label of “crazy drunk single guy”, especially at the time.
As someone who lives in SF among the plentiful poop of mentally ill people and purebred dogs, I can safely say this: no laws either restricting or permitting the activities of homeless people will have the slightest effect on what they do every day. These are people who really don’t give a fuck about anything but running out of their preferred intoxicant.
I still don’t see what you’re talking about. Welfare reform made work a requirement, or eventually benefits were cut off; there were services, however limited, to assist in finding work. It made being poor “more unpleasant”, I guess, in the same way any benefit cut did.
By contrast, “can’t sit on the sidewalk” measures are strictly punitive misery-inducing, in the hopes that if you make the homeless harassed and unhappy enough they’ll, uh, just decide to stop being homeless I guess? There’s no attached transition program or services, so the goal is just to harass them enough to get them to go live in someone else’s town.
Replace “unpleasant” with “gratitously mean” in my original statement, I guess.
People working downtown will report that the overwhelming majority of (what look like) homeless are somewhat-dysfunctional-men.
The downtown visible homeless are not representative of the population.
I was there in July. Yes it was damn hot and humid. Maybe the homeless leave for the summer too.
I’m not sure Houngan is with you, though. I think the part that really got me was “24/7 access to bathrooms, showers, water and clean syringes.” The rest of it I can get behind, but that seems like they’re requiring state-run truck stops free of charge to any and all. I wish I could find those sort of amenities when I travel.
I don’t really fault the welfare system for its inefficiencies though I do argue with those that claim there aren’t any abusers in the system; there are. The ratio is always up for debate. I’ll also walk back my earlier statement about car camping since I recalled in the interim that there is a huge chunk of working homeless that are forced to live out of their cars, though I would be for some sort of distinction between someone in that situation and someone just camping out on the sidewalk.
The New Deal, that’s what i was referring too in my last post:
That’s one way of getting people back to work, homeless as well as those with homes.
You guys let your friend lose his home, lose his foot, and get to the point of death before helping him? Really?
We don’t need a “Homeless Bill of Rights”, or government intervention; we need a hard lesson in compassion for our friends and neighbors!
Pertinent:
Such beliefs are starkly at odds with the basic facts regarding social programs, the analysis finds. Federal budget and Census data show that, in 2010, 91 percentof the benefit dollars from entitlement and other mandatory programs went to the elderly (people 65 and over), the seriously disabled, and members of working households. People who are neither elderly nor disabled — and do not live in a working household — received only 9 percent of the benefits.
Moreover, the vast bulk of that 9 percent goes for medical care, unemployment insurance benefits (which individuals must have a significant work history to receive), Social Security survivor benefits for the children and spouses of deceased workers, and Social Security benefits for retirees between ages 62 and 64. Seven out of the 9 percentage points go for one of these four purposes.
There’s quite a bit more, and I would appreciate if someone could elaborate on some of the points, such as what tax expenditures cover in this context:
The distribution of entitlement benefits stands in sharp contrast to the distribution of benefits for tax expenditures, which former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has called “tax entitlements.” The Tax Policy Center finds that under current tax policy:a
The top fifth of the population receives 66 percent of tax-expenditure benefits (compared to 10 percent of entitlement benefits).
The middle 60 percent of the population receives a little over 31 percent of tax-expenditure benefits (compared to 58 percent of entitlement benefits).
The bottom fifth receives just 2.8 percent of tax-expenditure benefits (compared to 32 percent of entitlement benefits).b
The top 1 percent of the population receives 23.9 percent of tax-expenditure benefits — more than eight times as much as the bottom fifth of the population, and nearly as much as the middle 60 percent of the population