Among the most concerning trends was a nearly 40% rise in family homelessness — one of the areas that was most affected by the arrival of migrants in big cities. Family homelessness more than doubled in 13 communities impacted by migrants including Denver, Chicago and New York City, according to HUD, while it rose less than 8% in the remaining 373 communities.
Communities — especially in Western states — have been enforcing bans on camping as public pressure grows to address what some residents say are dangerous and unsanitary living conditions. That follows a 6-3 ruling earlier this year by the Supreme Court that found that outdoor sleeping bans don’t violate the Eighth Amendment.
I advocate giving them part of Kansas, which has moderate winters and lots of land. A few hundred square miles, bring in 10,000 shipping containers, outfit them with rudimentary plumbing and sanitary necessities; start a civilian force akin to the Army or Peace Corp to monitor it, pay for it , and give them all bus tickets to it.
McMansions are probably more profitable. Like the auto industry abandoning lower priced models, pushing ATP to the edge of $50,000, catering to better financed customers, to push profits higher.
Solution? A pogrom to drive foreigners out of the country, freeing up their jobs and housing for USians.
Oh sure, but overall the winter climate is described as “moderate”, at least in the databases I looked at. The only place that isn’t is Southern California, and real estate is too pricey there. I would have suggested North Dakota or Montana, because “who cares”, but they get hellacious winters, and I’m not entirely heartless to the homeless living in such conditions for months. A week or two in Kansas? Well, suck it up, guys.
Building a homeless city out of shipping containers wouldn’t take much real estate at all. A few thousand acres. Heck, we give up that much to build a new sports stadium and highway interchange about every 50 miles nowadays.
The problem of homelessness has many causes. One of the primary causes is mental illness (and there have been arguments ad nauseam about how that came about, about the closure of most public mental facilities, etc). And when you put large groups of people with various mental illnesses together, usually bad things will happen. So homeless “villages” anywhere isn’t really going to work well. It might even be worse than the way it is today. Today there are encampments of tens or hundreds of homeless along with the bad stuff that happens there. Put thousands together and you probably multiply those problems dramatically.
So your answer to this will be “well, I don’t mean to just dump them into the wilderness all alone into those shipping containers, we will provide supervision and healthcare.” Well, congratulations, you pretty much just described a mental institution, like what we had up to the 70s and into the 80s. I lived less than a mile away from one of the largest ones in those years. Over the years since, it has been completely shut down, and the large property converted to a college campus instead.
Yep. in the 1980 many facilities were closed. And most were h3ll holes. And in most treatment was negligible. They were frankly similar to prisons. Governors loved the closing of those facilities as that freed up on funds for other projects.
Good psychiatric hospitals or construction of affordable housing instead of McMansions will cost money. I just don’t see much a corporate interest in such. And corporate interest is what it takes to move congress to address such issues. It took presidential pressure to reindustrialize the USA. Corporations were quite happy with having their manufacturing done in China or other low labor cost nations. Americans just want the homeless along with old geezers out of sight and out of mind.
At the time, Evans said that the all the state’s counties had “viable community mental health programs in operation,” but he also said the state would need a substantial increase in funding to “serve all those who need help.”
Gov. Evans, who is now 97 years old, said the move to close psychiatric hospitals was done with good intentions, and he pointed out that the change was part of a national trend.
Too bad Gov Evans you lived too long and let your political past catch up to you. Hm Just what did you spend the money saved from closed psychiatric hospitals on?
People can’t afford the houses that are being built. And Amazon is selling decent houses for less than $30,000 that supposedly can be built by five people in less than a day. Of course, you’ve got to have the land to put the house on and the plumbing and electrical connections and permits and so on. Sooner or later someone is going to start selling “home ready” lots. I hope they are not out in the middle of nowhere, so they actually can be practical for real people.
You don’t have to be crazy to be broke. Homelessness itself can easily cause mental illness, so frequently the cart brings in the horse.
Well, I have a bit of experience to lend. I worked at Greystone State Mental Hospital in New Jersey for three years in the 1960’s. I was a painter, summer job, but had access to almost all the buildings and many of the doctors’ residences (which were provided them in lieu of, or as part of big doctor salaries.)
The buildings were huge, stately, and kept in fairly decent repair. There were residents of all sorts, from people freely walking around to those strapped down in straight-jackets, and who would eat a cigarette if they found it on the floor.
I can’t speak to “treatment”, except to say there was some, and there were many doctors and orderlies, caretakers, nurses, and janitors. I don’t mean to paint too kindly a picture, it was not somewhere you wanted to be. But it was not a h3ll hole by any stretch and it served to keep the worst of the worst off the streets and confined in a place where they could be monitored, confined, and/or treated and released. (There were several buildings for inmates of varying propensities for violence - and we were in all of them. One we did not enter was the TB (tuberculosis) building, for obvious reasons.)
That’s all the information I will give, but if you’ve read this far I have two stories to offer:
Some of the buildings had great, soaring lobbies, vaulted ceilings 3 stories high, and we had to paint them. So we built scaffolding, climbed up top, and painted away. Once one of the kindly looking elderly women came to one of the corners of the scaffolding and started shaking it violently, causing those of us up high to hold on for dear life. A couple of orderlies came to our rescue, leading the woman back to her room (two to a room, bedroom style) and we never heard from her again. But several of us came close to a change of underwear, I’ll say. She just innocently wanted food or something, I forget. It wasn’t malicious, she just didn’t understand where the boundaries were.
The second story is the “hot girl” story. A new resident, this time in a smaller ward, appeared as we were beginning work and she was gorgeous. Beautiful face, fabulous body, and she dressed for it. Needless to say, our crew of young college males was immediately interested and began to chat her up. She seemed entirely normal, laughing and conversing like any other human would until one of us asked “So why are you in here?”, a reasonable question in light of her demeanor.
“Oh, I killed my boyfriend. Shotgun to the chest.”
Interest waned quickly, though I doubt I need explain that further.
Greystone also housed those convicted of criminal offense “by reason of insanity”, and we found out first hand.
In the 60s, those places were still somewhat reasonable with regards to care. Or alternatively, the horrors were more hidden. But by the mid 70s, after civil rights has sunk in (including for the “insane”) there were already plenty of nasty stories that had escaped those walls. They even made a movie based on some of those stories. But even by the end of the 60s, there were rights groups clamoring for the granting of full freedom to the “insane” that were locked up in those places, by the 70s, they started allowing them out onto the streets, by the end of the 80s they were almost all released onto the streets.
Keep in mind that mental hospitals were closed after drugs like thorazine were developed to treat mental health issues. That took the bars off of mental hospitals. And offered potential for treatment where previously none worked.
There were supposed to be mental health clinics to help the patients. They never materialized. And many seem to stop taking their meds.
We can do better. But it takes committment to the program and funding.
That was the excuse offered in Michigan, when most of the state mental hospitals were closed. They were supposed to be replaced by community centers, but the community centers were never funded. So, now, the county jails are the defacto mental wards, were people can be medicated and supervised. The important thing, from the perspective of the (L&Ses) in Lansing, is their care is now on the county budgets, so the state can use the money no longer spent on mental hospitals on another tax cut for the “JCs”.
