| A nice lady commented that our unhoused problem could be solved if we just found cheap land, created a tiny house village, and equipped each home with solar and composting toilets. Here’s the problem: The people you see on the street represent roughly one-third of the homeless population (btw, they’re far more offended by “unhoused” than homeless). The people you don’t see are already taking advantage of some type of shelter or housing program, but those programs, as a whole, have between a 50 and 70% success rate. I’ve worked with the homeless for some time now, and I have yet to hear someone say their problem is, or was, “affordable housing.” Now, I don’t work with those folks who are already in shelters, so their problem might actually be a lack of affordable housing, so the tiny house village idea would likely help, at best, 70% of 33% of the total homeless population. If that plan were implemented nationwide, it could affect the greatest reduction in homelessness in American history. It would only cost about a billion dollars plus annual upkeep, but it wouldn’t change a thing about what we see outside our car windows every day. The long-term solution to homelessness is prevention. We cannot and should not waste our resources on people who are not willing to do what’s necessary to get off the street. If we can’t even help the total number of people who are willing to put in the effort, there’s just no hope of creating some magical environment that attracts drug addicts to go live there, as opposed to public places where they can count on others to provide them with enough handouts to get by and enough drugs to remain disconnected from reality. |
| Another thought was to spend the money on mental health care. Ok… that’s an idea. |
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| The mental health aspect is interesting. I read that roughly 15% of our American population has some sort of mental illness, whereas as much as 25% of the homeless population suffers from mental illness. There were no particulars given regarding the types, severity, or debilitating effects of the illnesses, so some assumption is inevitable. My observation is that drug use can be a cause or an effect (or both) of mental illness, as meth and fentanyl are so affordable and can be severely damaging over time. I’ve learned that, in life, one of the hardest obstacles to overcome is a good excuse. Diagnosing someone with something that may not be particularly diminishing can still strip away their desire to excel. With that in mind, it’s hard to say what it would cost to create a mental health program, nationwide, for homeless folks, but they probably represent around the same number of people–1 – 1.5 million–as those discussed above. They’d also require permanent shelter to achieve any level of success through therapy, and those institutions, therapists, administrators, nurses, guards, etc, need salaries; the cost would certainly exceed $5 billion annually, which would be fine if it were effective in reducing the homeless population by as much as 25%. USICH had an annual budget of $10B as of 2019, but the population increased by about 17% despite its efforts. Again, the answer is in prevention; otherwise, we’ll keep replacing the success stories with three times as many people who fall through the cracks. Keep those comments and suggestions coming in! |