this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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This article has a great deep dive on how we have so few "free" or community-sourced places in the US that they often get used as a catch-all for any and all social problems we have. See: libraries as homeless shelters. From the article:
That's a great point -- by making public places the only places you can exist while poor, you push all the homeless there and everyone else ends up avoiding it and going to places they have to spend money at. Enforced consumption.
Picnic in the park? Sorry, tent city there. Better go to a restaurant instead.
Baseball at the diamond? Needles and excrement, let's go bowling instead.
Grab some books from the library? Someone's smoking crack in the bathroom, I'll just buy the book from a store. Or Amazon.
Ideally these public spaces would be for everyone, but more and more they're repurposed for social services.
Obvious solution: stop making people homeless.
Full disclosure: I work in a library shelving materials.
This take overlooks one of the factors that really needs to be addressed: mental illness. I have seen people without full control of their faculties outright refuse assistance because for whatever reason they believe that what they are being offered isn't good for them. Some of them want help, but some of those also want help on their terms, which is not how a lot of social/outreach programs work. And that's not even getting into the issues of substance abuse that act as a black hole for any material gain. Granted, there are people who will jump through any hoop to escape being homeless, but many who suffer the most really need more than just a place to live; they need to completely overhaul their lives, and our social system isn't currently designed to do that.
Adding onto this, you can't really overhaul your entire life unless you have a place to live.
I'm speaking from the other side, I spent some time homeless, and I agree with you. Some people do need more than just a place to live. They need mental health treatment, they need assistance with their drug dependency. They need professional help.
But, it's also impossible for someone to consistently get professional help unless they have a consistent place to rest their head.
Because again, I am agreeing with you, but the part I disagree in is the order of where mental illness comes in. Because I reckon for a lot of homeless folk, they start off fine, and then the trauma of the situation sends them completely mentally loose. I was lucky to have the internet and my friends to keep me stable enough, and even I have plenty of screws lost now.
It's a hard issue to solve, and I genuinely think it'll take decades of actual effort (not half measures) to see some actual gain. And homelessness is literally ingrained into an economy of winners and losers. Because it is a lot more than just stop making people homeless at this point.
Literally everything is easier if you have a door you can lock and a roof over your head. Even if it doesn't get you all the way.
I think if people "want help on their terms", social/outreach programs should be designed to actually be appealing to those people and less restrictive, where possible. This might include stuff like, for example, allowing homeless folks to bring their dog with them into shelters, or just trying not to impose unnecessarily on their lives and autonomy (beyond what's needed for safety of others) and not making help conditional where it doesn't need to be (e.g. you can have a roof only if you get off this drug and take a weekly drug test, else you get the boot and can sleep in the snow again), because that'll just feel like bullying/coersion and make them want to listen even less. Everybody's more likely to do a thing if it's an ask or an offer, and not a demand with an " or else" threat attached.
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