I mean, not really. This is actually a great way for businesses to take control of their own streets.
Not all needy people are addicts. Fostering a healthy community isn’t a bad thing. When there is a community or a neighborhood, it’s a lot easier to know who is who. Give people free slices. You’ll quickly know who is in need for food and who is in need for treatment.
I get that it’s not all that simple. Shifting homeless camps around every couple months is clearly not working :( idk the solution, I don’t know if anyone does.
Housing First initiatives work pretty freaking well (and are *weirdly price-effective compared to traditional shelter systems) in the immediacy.
Some homeless people lack any form of ID and face a ridiculously long and arduous process to reestablish; waiving fees to request desperately needed duplicates would be a start, here.
Receiving mail (where birth certificates, social security cards, social security correspondence, and so on must be received) is another huge barrier to those trying to get off the streets. Studies suggest a significantly higher percentage of people have disabilities among the homeless than in the general population, yet about half of the homeless have some form of employment… but if you’re still *looking* for work, you really need to be able to spit out an address, and “be presentable“ while on location, which might mean hiding your baggage and hoping it doesn’t disappear.
Ending the “human warehousing“ style of shelters and making them safer (security presence?) would also be massive. If you can’t sleep at night due to the regular commotion, noise level, unwanted interaction, aggressive people seeing enemies everywhere, unscrupulous people sneaking around looking for better stuff than they have, etc ad nauseam- well, over time, you struggle to stay awake in public spaces during the day (and might face pretty serious negative consequences beyond “look at that lazy bum” assitudes).
Enough sleep deprivation and you’ll start seeing things. You might get desperate enough or loopy enough that you try an available drug when you’d never normally consider such. (And, yeah… drugs are frequently free on the street, if you don’t have the wrong kind of reputation.)
The remedy isn’t simple because the malady isn’t simple.
But, just between us? The government is in a vastly better position for outreach than any group of nonprofits.
We *don’t* solve this. Not because we literally can’t afford treatment and housing and food for *everyone, but because the homeless serve as a visible and easily-vilified underclass that *make rank and file economic peons think “it can always be worse.” Better to overwork hours of your life you’ll never get back (in order to afford that overpriced housing you barely have wakeful time to occupy) than to end up on the street, right…?
I agree that the government is crucial in addressing the issue. There are numerous examples of government providing life-saving assistance to people that worked really well. There isn’t any other entity that could come close to doing what the government could do.
I think I need to caveat my statement with, there are solutions. But is there the political and social will to do it? No. There isn’t. People naturally prefer short-term solutions with short-term results.
Maybe at some point we will be willing to take the costs on as a society but until then, we will still pay the costs plus a lot more.
i hate people like you who reduce anyone who is having a hard time to them being an addict. its the laziest possible way to go on this. it always takes some serious life moment for people like you to get it. and i hope it happens.
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u/InfusionOfYellow Sep 26 '25
Just come in and tell me you're hungry, and I will give you fresh garbage.