Quote:
Originally Posted by edale
There is nothing like LA's Skid Row in Europe, or any other developed nation on earth. It's a complete aberration to have tent villages not just in one area of downtown, but scattered all around the city like you see in basically all the major West Coast cities.
We put up with absolutely terrible, anti-social behavior in the name of misguided compassion. The activist class likes to say that the US refuses to give resources to fight the homeless problem, but that's just not true. Los Angeles and San Francisco spend billions of dollars every year on shelters, provision of services, homeless outreach, and construction of permanent supportive housing. Not to mention all the money spent cleaning up the heaps of garbage and refuse that the homeless leave behind. What do we get for all this money spent? Not much, as the problems continue to get worse.
We need a mechanism to forcibly remove the mentally ill from the streets. We have a group of people who essentially function as toddlers, and yet we think the answer to solve these problems is to just give all of them their own housing, free of charge, no questions asked, forever. That seems absurd to me, and it's clearly not working here.
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We don't have a homeless problem because of misguided compassion. "The activist class" may be misguided, but I don't think they are really calling the shots on how cities respond to the homeless problem. Cities fall short in their response because they don't have the resources to address the problem in a meaningful way. Yes, LA and San Francisco are spending a lot of money on the homeless, but it's obviously inadequate. And in LA in particular, a dedicated funding stream for supportive housing and other homeless remediation measures has only been available for a few years. In San Diego, there is no dedicated funding for the homeless. Money being spent now is what the city got from the federal government and the state as part of COVID relief.
We have a massive run-up in rents; we have work from home that has emptied out downtowns thereby making the homeless presence more troubling; we have a fentanyl epidemic; even the proliferation of tents, which you didn't used to see very often, makes the problem seem worse by making it harder to ignore,. With all these issues coming to a head at the same time, is it any wonder that cities are floundering?
In fact, it's unrealistic to expect cities to solve the homeless problem on their own, especially since many of the homeless in west coast cities in particular are arrivals from other places. Unfortunately, I doubt we're in a political climate in which the federal government is going to step in to help. Instead the homeless problem in "Democrat-led" cities will just continue to serve as a useful political foil.
I do agree that we need to develop a legal mechanism for requiring people who need help (either due to mental illness or drug addiction) to accept it when it's offered. But we are a long way from having the resources available to help even the people who want that help. In LA, people who want to get into drug addiction programs vastly outnumber the available places in those programs.
And back to Finland's success. Yes, being a small, "monocultural" country makes dealing homelessness easier, but mainly because in that kind of country it's easier to generate the political will to do something about the problem. In the U.S. the more typical response is to make the issue someone else's problem to deal with.