Do you think the homeless situation in west coast cities will ever get better?

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

I trust your analysis that capacity is an issue. However, I think Americans could come together to help those with major mental issues. The money is more than worth it, by many angles.

Well last time we tried that, it didn't last very long:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental...ms_Act_of_1980

This article (The Atlantic, not necessarily an unbiased source) talks about many of the issues through the lens of Cook County Jail.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...a-jail/395012/

Here is an article from the National Review for "balance": https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...reatment-beds/
which advocates ending the Medicaid "Institutions of Mental Disease" exclusion, which actually prevents Medicaid from being used for most psychiatric hospitals.

More info here (NAMI is a great organization, by the way.):
https://www.nami.org/Advocacy/Policy...-IMD-Exclusion

[Buckeye Native 001]

That's probably part of the problem: It's going to require a level of investment wherein the effects won't immediately be seen/reaped and subject to change at random depending on who's in control of decision making.

At the very least, I think most people are starting to see the value in investing in mental health treatment, at least compared to where we were 15 years ago when it was still a taboo subject. In many ways, it still is, but there's been some progress. We're also starting to (sort of?) treat addiction and substance abuse as mental health issues rather than criminal issues. Where I work (probation), it often feels like we're the first people to actually talk to and treat our clients like they're human beings, and we're on the back end of the criminal justice system (rehabilitation and corrections).

If I'm being wishy-washy about this, I'm aware and I don't like how I sound, either. We're at a fork in the road where we could either make things worse or better, but not everyone's gonna be happy about it either way.

[pj3000]

How much do federal, state, and local govts spend on managing homelessness per year?

[ue]

Originally Posted by destroycreate

I'm not going to lie--I'm getting super frustrated with the filth and squalor being allowed all over west coast cities. I feel like you aren't even allowed to express this openly without being labeled a hateful, heartless pig. I do have compassion for the homeless, and hate our fucked up cowboy capitalist society for enabling these inequities.

But should we not be allowed to be upset seeing needles scattered about on residential sidewalks?
Express disdain for bulky encampments with massive items like refrigerators taking up entire portions of the sidewalk in middle class neighborhoods?
Disgust for open air toilets?

A massive, shanty encampment right next to my apartment complex (originally right outside our lobby, the dude was hoping for our leasing office to pay him to go away) in Koreatown recently went up in flames. Cooking Crystal Meth inside was the culprit. Who knows if this could've caused a massive explosion--what I can tell you is that the blackened encampment was left in the open and untouched by the city for upwards of 2 weeks.

I get that people need a tent and to be able to live somewhere, but I don't like that a free for all is being allowed, where people can set up shop just anywhere. Seriously, hardworking families with children shouldn't have to have their kids step over squalor and drug dens to wait for the school bus. In my part of LA, it's the norm. Why can't we designate certain areas better?

It just seems like this is only going to get worse with every year, despite more money being thrown at the issue than ever before. IMO, it's really affecting quality of life out here. Do we think this issue will ever be resolvable?

Jesus Christ.

You claim to have "compassion" for unhoused individuals and hate a "fucked up cowboy capitalist society" but your answer is... we need to impose further barriers to their lives of those who already face so many by restricting where they can exist. Do you not see how egregiously egoistic and classist you sound?

Despite your awareness of capitalism being a problem in this situation, you offer no solutions for the actual people who find themselves without access to safe and adequate housing, and are only concerned with yourself and how you feel about their presence. It really shouldn't be about you. Like, yes, it sucks to have to walk by used syringes, or whatever, but at the end of the day, you get to go back to adequate shelter, have access to income, and so forth, so who cares what you think?

The focus should not be on basically corralling houseless folks into designated quarters so that essentially gentrifiers can not have to look at this "squalor" or whatever villainous term you'd like to project onto marginalized people. It should be with providing housing, access to education, healthcare (including safe injection sites, mental health resources), and employment, and giving them community spaces.

Get over yourself. It sounds like you'd have a better time in a more whitewashed, sanitized urban experience. You know Anaheim isn't very far from you, right? Yes, it sucks to see these situations, but if you truly care, then do something that actually helps these people, rather than advocating for their removal, citing they somehow have less of a right to your "middle class" neighbourhood than you. The arrogance you show against those living without housing is abhorrent. Do better.

[TexasPlaya]

Originally Posted by JManc

As long as your cities enable this shit...no. I think there should be assistance provided to the poor and destitute but they should not be allowed to squat on public property in tent cities indefinitely. I never visited Skid Row in LA but SF was pretty gross. We have a problem with it here in Texas as well but the local governments are more hardlined about it and routinely clears these camps out. Well, except for Austin who is at odds with the state on how to deal with their homeless.

Austin vs Houston is interesting. A lot homeless camps in the former and more panhandling in the latter from my experience.

[destroycreate]

Originally Posted by ue

Jesus Christ.

You claim to have "compassion" for unhoused individuals and hate a "fucked up cowboy capitalist society" but your answer is... we need to impose further barriers to their lives of those who already face so many by restricting where they can exist. Do you not see how egregiously egoistic and classist you sound?

Despite your awareness of capitalism being a problem in this situation, you offer no solutions for the actual people who find themselves without access to safe and adequate housing, and are only concerned with yourself and how you feel about their presence. It really shouldn't be about you. Like, yes, it sucks to have to walk by used syringes, or whatever, but at the end of the day, you get to go back to adequate shelter, have access to income, and so forth, so who cares what you think?

The focus should not be on basically corralling houseless folks into designated quarters so that essentially gentrifiers can not have to look at this "squalor" or whatever villainous term you'd like to project onto marginalized people. It should be with providing housing, access to education, healthcare (including safe injection sites, mental health resources), and employment, and giving them community spaces.

Get over yourself. It sounds like you'd have a better time in a more whitewashed, sanitized urban experience. You know Anaheim isn't very far from you, right? Yes, it sucks to see these situations, but if you truly care, then do something that actually helps these people, rather than advocating for their removal, citing they somehow have less of a right to your "middle class" neighbourhood than you. The arrogance you show against those living without housing is abhorrent. Do better.

Oh good god spare me the virtue signaling and shaming (as if you would ever truly be willing to invite some random person off the street and move them into your home). So, are you saying that it's totally OK encampments just be allowed to thrive anywhere as they currently are? As far as your romanticizing of urban blight and decay under the guise of it being part of the ~urban experience~...no honey...just because someone doesn't want encampments and massive piles of trash and debris on their residential streets, doesn't mean they're not cut out for city living. I'm saying what pretty much most people who are hard working, middle class folks, already trying to make ends meet themselves, want to say. Instead of just gaslighting people who have very valid frustrations, maybe also show some compassion to them too? To clarify, I'd gladly pay much higher taxes and adopt a Canadian or Northern European welfare state system but my fellow citizens won't have it because #CoMmUnIsM!

Once constant car break ins, tent cities, and decay start showing up on your doorstep in the way that is is in LA you'll be signing a very different tune. Take a cushy Canadian seat until then.

[edale]

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by ue

Jesus Christ.

You claim to have "compassion" for unhoused individuals and hate a "fucked up cowboy capitalist society" but your answer is... we need to impose further barriers to their lives of those who already face so many by restricting where they can exist. Do you not see how egregiously egoistic and classist you sound?

Despite your awareness of capitalism being a problem in this situation, you offer no solutions for the actual people who find themselves without access to safe and adequate housing, and are only concerned with yourself and how you feel about their presence. It really shouldn't be about you. Like, yes, it sucks to have to walk by used syringes, or whatever, but at the end of the day, you get to go back to adequate shelter, have access to income, and so forth, so who cares what you think?

The focus should not be on basically corralling houseless folks into designated quarters so that essentially gentrifiers can not have to look at this "squalor" or whatever villainous term you'd like to project onto marginalized people. It should be with providing housing, access to education, healthcare (including safe injection sites, mental health resources), and employment, and giving them community spaces.

Get over yourself. It sounds like you'd have a better time in a more whitewashed, sanitized urban experience. You know Anaheim isn't very far from you, right? Yes, it sucks to see these situations, but if you truly care, then do something that actually helps these people, rather than advocating for their removal, citing they somehow have less of a right to your "middle class" neighbourhood than you. The arrogance you show against those living without housing is abhorrent. Do better.

I mean, it's a fair question to ask why homelessness is so much morevisible in some places than others.

The US does not even have a high homelessness rate compared to peer countries (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ess_population , although obviously it's hard to compare numbers between countries.). But you'll find no place in Canada or New Zealand remotely like skid row.

[LosAngelesSportsFan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I think residents of west coast cities should solve the problems that they complain about incessantly. And I think the rest of us are tired of hearing about those problems.

Ya, that's real fair. Let us pay for all the crack heads from around the country who come here. Fucking bullshit. Enough of the coddling of these people on the streets. 90% are mentally ill or on drugs. Letting them die in the streets because a few advocates continue to sue cities and hamstring every attempt to rectify these issues is insanity. Thankfully, judge Carter in LA is about to lay down the hammer

[LosAngelesSportsFan]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

The answer is to vote for new leaders that are less concerned about "wokeness" and more concerned with....

DOING

THEIR

GODDAMNED

JOBS

This. In LA, we need to get rid of Garcetti who enables this bullshit and doesn't allow anyone to do anything. Any homeless person can put up a tent anywhere and we have to accept it. No recourse

[LosAngelesSportsFan]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

Progressives, say this along with me:

Homelessness that you can see has VERY LITTLE to do with housing. Period.

1. If a homeless person can't afford housing in SF, move. They are in the best position on Earth to move. They can panhandle for a few days for a greyhound ticket to Mississippi.

2. Most homeless aren't visable. They are on a friend or family member's couch. We aren't talking about them...

3. Drugs are a huge issue, but there doesn't seem to be a consensus on how to deal with it. The Right just wants to arrest and the Left talks a good game but their results are pretty much null.

4. Mental issues. Again, the Left talks a good game but zero will happen until these people can be put into a psych ward for an extended amount of time. The Left HATES this idea, and I get it. But what else are you going to do?

Drug users and mentally unstable people aren't gonna change based on you giving them a studio apartment. It might make you feel good, but it doesn't change the dynamics in a city much.

So will the west coast or basically any large city in America deal with this issue? No.

Amen

[LosAngelesSportsFan]

Originally Posted by ue

Jesus Christ.

You claim to have "compassion" for unhoused individuals and hate a "fucked up cowboy capitalist society" but your answer is... we need to impose further barriers to their lives of those who already face so many by restricting where they can exist. Do you not see how egregiously egoistic and classist you sound?

Despite your awareness of capitalism being a problem in this situation, you offer no solutions for the actual people who find themselves without access to safe and adequate housing, and are only concerned with yourself and how you feel about their presence. It really shouldn't be about you. Like, yes, it sucks to have to walk by used syringes, or whatever, but at the end of the day, you get to go back to adequate shelter, have access to income, and so forth, so who cares what you think?

The focus should not be on basically corralling houseless folks into designated quarters so that essentially gentrifiers can not have to look at this "squalor" or whatever villainous term you'd like to project onto marginalized people. It should be with providing housing, access to education, healthcare (including safe injection sites, mental health resources), and employment, and giving them community spaces.

Get over yourself. It sounds like you'd have a better time in a more whitewashed, sanitized urban experience. You know Anaheim isn't very far from you, right? Yes, it sucks to see these situations, but if you truly care, then do something that actually helps these people, rather than advocating for their removal, citing they somehow have less of a right to your "middle class" neighbourhood than you. The arrogance you show against those living without housing is abhorrent. Do better.

No, you do better. This bullshit mentality is why we are in this predicament now. THIS IS NOT A HOUSING ISSUE. We need to enforce laws and clean this nonsense up. Enough is enough

[Nite]

Originally Posted by destroycreate

I'm not going to lie--I'm getting super frustrated with the filth and squalor being allowed all over west coast cities. I feel like you aren't even allowed to express this openly without being labeled a hateful, heartless pig. I do have compassion for the homeless, and hate our fucked up cowboy capitalist society for enabling these inequities.

But should we not be allowed to be upset seeing needles scattered about on residential sidewalks?
Express disdain for bulky encampments with massive items like refrigerators taking up entire portions of the sidewalk in middle class neighborhoods?
Disgust for open air toilets?

A massive, shanty encampment right next to my apartment complex (originally right outside our lobby, the dude was hoping for our leasing office to pay him to go away) in Koreatown recently went up in flames. Cooking Crystal Meth inside was the culprit. Who knows if this could've caused a massive explosion--what I can tell you is that the blackened encampment was left in the open and untouched by the city for upwards of 2 weeks.

I get that people need a tent and to be able to live somewhere, but I don't like that a free for all is being allowed, where people can set up shop just anywhere. Seriously, hardworking families with children shouldn't have to have their kids step over squalor and drug dens to wait for the school bus. In my part of LA, it's the norm. Why can't we designate certain areas better?

It just seems like this is only going to get worse with every year, despite more money being thrown at the issue than ever before. IMO, it's really affecting quality of life out here. Do we think this issue will ever be resolvable?

I have always believed that the more services you have for the homeless, the more you attract and the only solution is to not have any homeless services, ie no food or clothes banks, no homeless shelters, nothing and for the police to confiscate and destroy all their positions except what they are wearing. 90% of the homeless will movie out with a month under these conditions.

I wish someone would do a study showing the amount of homeless per capita vs the amount of services per capita. I fell pretty confident that the homeless end up in the cities that offer the most services.

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

^ Sounds a bit like cherry picking.

I just did my own streetview of downtown LA and it looked pretty "clean" to me

It is. Not saying they're not tents, but the south psrk area of downtown "(biggest neighborhood in land area) doesn't have much.
I was there a couple days ago.

Sure, if you're looking around near skid row, you'd probably see it. It's not in the financial district, arts district really.
Little Tokyo is kept clean, but it borders skid row.

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by LosAngelesSportsFan

Ya, that's real fair. Let us pay for all the crack heads from around the country who come here. Fucking bullshit. Enough of the coddling of these people on the streets. 90% are mentally ill or on drugs. Letting them die in the streets because a few advocates continue to sue cities and hamstring every attempt to rectify these issues is insanity. Thankfully, judge Carter in LA is about to lay down the hammer

Yea, I think things will change with Carter. I thimk improvements will start this year.

[James Bond Agent 007]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

Luckily in Chicago, despite the SJW nature of the newest breed of leaders, we've got an automatic anti-homelessness program.

It's called:

It's going to be -6 degrees F this upcoming Saturday!

Yup. The main reason homelessness on the west coast is such a problem is the mild weather.

Forecast for Sunday morning:



Forecast for a week from Saturday:



Here in KC we have a moderate homeless problem. It would probably be better if KC didn't have one of the milder Midwest climates.

[James Bond Agent 007]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

Homelessness that you can see has VERY LITTLE to do with housing. Period.

I agree with this. Kansas City has affordable housing up the kazoo, but we still have a decent amount of homeless.

[The North One]

I was looking at parts of central Los Angeles on google streetview the other day (I know, It doesn't make me some kind of expert by any means) but as I searched around there was a point where I saw nothing but homeless camps, tents and people sleeping on the sidewalk on EVERY street for blocks and blocks and blocks. It just kept going on and on, so I went to the above view and you can literally see the fucking homeless camps everywhere on the damn satellite view! I knew it was really bad but that honestly surprised me.

This isn't some temporarily problem, there is something seriously wrong with the West Coast (also the US in general) and I can honestly only see it getting worse without major government interventions.

[LA21st]

Uh, yea. That's skid row.
That's the only place in the city that's like what you described.

Is it sad and depressing? Yes. But people don't live or work in that area unless it's services for the homeless. Skid row is worse now, but it's always been the ugliest part of the metro area.
It's not a new thing.

[muppet]

My city had a massive homeless problem in the 80s under uber capitalist Thatcherite Britain, with tens of thousands of street sleepers each night, and many areas of the centre a cesspool -whenever it snowed about 7 people would die. She also took away the position of London mayor for its problematic left wing opposition, under 'Red Ken', so the crisis couldn't even be unified. 20 years later the position was restored and Ken Livingstone re-elected -begging was made illegal, and homelessness was attacked by the charities. Street sleeping was tackled by getting sheltered accommodation provided for everyone (and they would still be registered as homeless), plus mental health infrastructure and of course the free healthcare covering everything from substance abuse to HIV, plus free housing for the especially vulnerable (big waiting list though), such as those with families or mental health issues. Several no-go areas where tent cities had been (Waterloo, Kings X, Victoria, Docklands, Embankment, Battersea) were redeveloped. Crime rates halved, the coffers actually made a profit.

Homelessness is still an issue but that's people who aren't sleeping on the streets anymore. I know two people whove been through the system and now have stable homes, jobs and families.