Category: Homelessness

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Conservative columnist Heather MacDonald recently bemoaned the mentally ill people roaming the streets of our city. She describes the failure of civil institutions to protect regular people from these people. Texas Republican Governor Abbott thinks that better mental health care is the solution to mass casualty shootings plaguing his state. Mental Health is the solution to these twin social ills the country is facing.

Better Mental Health certainly would help. The problem is what exactly are the solutions these Mental Health critics offering to meet these problems. Where will these mentally ill people be housed? Who will pay for their housing and medical care? How will their legal rights be protected? How do we identify the mentally ill? What will be the standard for involuntary institutionalization? These all call for the expansion of government oversight and infrastructure. They also all cost money.

How does this happen given the Conservative and Republican distaste for government regulation and taxes? Would they support an increase in taxes to insure that the mentally ill had suitable housing and healthcare? Would they support the psychological testing of gun buyers to determine if they have violent psychological problems? If protecting citizens is the goal, how much money are they willing to spend to achieve this goal? How do they propose protecting citizens from the criminally insane without a massive expansion of mental health and judicial systems? Prisons are not mental health clinics, putting the criminally insane into prisons

It is all well and good to point the finger at the mental health crisis but what are the mental health solutions? There are a lot of unanswered questions. Until these critics provide proposals to address these questions, their criticism is just loud noise to distract from the emptiness of their vision. They have absolutely nothing to offer that will solve these problems.

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A lot of people in California are talking about the homeless. The homeless population is growing. The homeless used to be invisible but now are visible to an uncomfortable degree. Because of this, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore them. They are annoying. They beg for money. They go through trashcans sometimes not even extending the courtesy of waiting for you to return to your home. They defecate on the streets. Their camps occupy block after block of city streets. They sometimes are angry. They are sometimes crazy. They are scary. They are making the California urban experience pretty unpleasant.

Californians are asking what can we do about the homeless? When anyone is ever pressed for a solution, though, they shrug their shoulders. There is no solution. Which isn’t exactly true. There are no cheap solutions.

Every solution, no matter where it comes from (Right, Left, Center), has the same glaring flaw. Money.

Some people want to jail them. Except this means we will need more police, more judges, more prisons. Plus there is the irony, particularly for people who don’t like spending money on the poor, that the tax payer ends up both housing the homeless and feeding them. No matter, it is a moot point. Despite the great satisfaction many people would have in rounding up the homeless and sending them to prison, there is no money for it.

Some people want to take care of the homeless which seems like the most humane way to handle them but, of course, housing costs money. Money for property buildings, money for property managers, money to maintain buildings. The rents will probably be supplemented by the government. All of this means money.

Some people want to address the psychiatric and/or drug problems that some of the homeless have. This requires hospitals, doctors, nurses, and social workers, all of which costs money.

You can see the problem here. It is money. Few people want to spend money on the homeless. I learned this first hand once when I had a conversation with a neighbor about the hepatitis epidemic which began in the homeless population. It had spilled over into the general population, so the city was trying to take action to stop the spread. My neighbor discovered a homeless man defecating on a sidewalk in our neighborhood. After filling me in on how he gave that particular piece of vermin a piece of his mind, he went on to fulminate about the city proposing a new tax that would provide more public restrooms for the homeless. He couldn’t understand why he should have to pay more taxes so the homeless would have restrooms. I thought I had a reasonable argument for him. I ventured, well, if there were more public toilets maybe he wouldn’t have to worry about homeless people defecating on the sidewalk. I was wrong. He would rather watch the neighborhood himself and chase away any offenders when necessary than pay more taxes. Mind you this was during a hepatitis epidemic. The city was washing down the streets with clorox.

So, the real problem here is we don’t have a way of raising the money that can address the needs of our homeless population. They are comparatively small group of citizens, don’t vote and seem completely overwhelmed by their circumstances to organize themselves into an effective political unit. This means that it is unlikely that any money is going to be funneled in their direction. In the meantime, we are left with the homeless.