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- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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“Hey, we really don’t want you out here on the street, so we’re gonna have to do something about it.”
“You’re gonna give us homes?”
“lol no”
“if we can’t have homes and we can’t be in public where are we supposed to go?”
“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
join the military or forced work camps in prison
Basically just suicide with extra steps
Suicide is illegal though, so you better make yourself profitable before you die.
Yeah but very lucrative steps.
As long as the majority of the value goes to a wealthy the country will allow it.
You either give them homes or you line them up and shoot them. Those are the only two options.
Though if bullets are too expensive you can just gas them and then cremate them, which might be a more efficient Final Solution to The Homeless Question.
American eugenics sought to solve poverty by forcibly sterilizing the poor. The only reason it fell out of favor was the great depression when suddenly people who were once employed decided that maybe this wasn’t fair now that they were about to be sterilized.
Which ties back in nicely to WW2, I unfortunately have to give some of the lawyers at the nunumberg trials praise for arguing “How can America sit in judgement of Nazi concentration camps when eugenics has been established legal by the Supreme Court?”
Anyways, economic eugenics is coming back in fashion thanks to NIMBYs that just can’t stand to see the results of treating the basics to life as commodities.
Bill Hicks, who wasn’t funny, said it best. The Land of the Free… if you’ve got the money.
“We’ll just make it illegal to be poor” is such an American take.
We stopped being a free country after the patriot act
You mean Reagan right.
The military industrial response to Vietnam protests and the utter unpopularity of an evil war that continues for decades and still has scars on America let alone SE Asia for me is the defining turn post WWII. Ike himself, as a general, directly stated the greatest threat to American democracy was the military industrial complex. The threats have multiplied since then.
The Atomic Cafe is a great documentary made solely with archival footage including the Ike quote above. It’s chilling hearing that said 60+ years ago by a general and sitting president.
Just look up Eisenhower’s speech when he left office where he warns of the Military Industrial Complex. He knew what was coming.
You’re not wrong, but there was plenty before Reagan and more to come.
Oh absolutely, it started as a shithole, how could it not end as one.
I blame Polk, personally. But Reagan gets some credit.
Were we ever free though?
All men were created equal, right? Except women, PoC, queer folk, non christians, catholics (sometimes), the Irish, the bottom 99% and so on.
The freedom promised by the constitution rang hollow on every enslaved person, and every woman.
I think freedom is qualified differently here. You’re free to own property. Then we “democratically” decide who and what can be owned as property based on our interpretation of the Jedi ancient texts.
/s
I thought washington had good support homeless. What gives?
Def not. Seattle had a really huge explosion from the pandemic. There was the huge encampent in international district near chinatown and seattle’s skid row towards 3rd st
The city hasn’t really addressed the problem and are usually just sweeping it under the rug by shuffling the people around
Encampments do not represent the entire homeless community. Those most visible encampments, littered with garbage and needles, are largely addicts or sometimes people with mental health issues.
Shuffling people around combats the street barricades and open air Fenty and gives respite to the communities that were hosting the camps.
Yes, you’re right about this being only the visible part of the homeless population. It’s tough to really track down on the not so visible side of homelessness. There probably are many people living in cars, crashing at friend’s houses, etc.
I wont deny that living or being next to these camps is terrible. I took the bus along that route and I would never get off there because you never know what could happen there. But while shuffling people around does have benefits, it doesn’t solve the problem of homelessness (no matter what the city says). Lots of this stem from the overall lack of safety nets, housing, education, etc. A tremendous task, but I’d love to see progress being made.
We have a lot of programs though. Maybe they aren’t doing a good job marketing themselves. Were you aware of these? Or do you consider them insufficient or under funded?
Housing and Essential Needs (HEN): A program that provides rental assistance and essential needs like food and transportation to low-income individuals who are unable to work due to a disability.
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF): Offers cash assistance to families with dependent children to help cover basic needs, including housing.
Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) Program: Provides funding to local governments and nonprofit organizations to develop and operate housing and supportive services for homeless individuals and families.
Rapid Rehousing Programs: These programs offer short-term rental assistance and case management to help individuals and families quickly transition out of homelessness and into permanent housing.
Emergency Shelter Grants: Funding provided to local governments and nonprofit organizations to operate emergency shelters and provide essential services to homeless individuals.
Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program: A federal program administered locally that provides rental assistance vouchers to low-income individuals and families, including those experiencing homelessness.
Lots of places swung hard the other way after the pandemic. That said there’s literally no easy this is constitutional and it’s already been ruled on. Some civil rights place will take it on for an easy slam dunk.
I don’t think the Constitution permits sleeping in any public space, but the ACLU is challenging on Eighth Amendment grounds in Grants Pass v. Johnson. So we’ll know soon enough if it’s Constitutional.
It doesn’t specifically ensure a right to sleep no but to enjoy public places is legal, I can camp on public grounds so long as it’s not gated or otherwise excluded or currently utilized. They can say don’t sleep on public benches because it prevents enjoyment from others and isn’t what they’re there for but if you pitch a tent in the woods that’s legal no matter what local governments say.
I don’t think there’s anything in the Constitution about enjoying public spaces either. If you’re allowed to camp on state land in your state it’s because your state law permits it.
If I have the right to protest on public spaces because I have a measurable property right to it then I have the same right of enjoyment for any other protected right included simply existing and the necessities thereof.
Someone already tried that in 1984. When homeless activists camped out on Lafayette Square in front of the White House, the Supreme Court ruled in Clark v. Community for Creative Nonviolence that the act of sleeping itself was “facilitative,” rather than “expressive,” meaning that campgrounds aren’t protected forms of speech at all.
No it was tried as a 1st amendment issue. It needs to be tried as a 4th amendment issue which it actually it.
Ie. Camping isn’t protected under the first amendment act as it isn’t expressive initself which that ruling if you read it makes clear. Essentially by itself it isn’t but it could theoretically be made expressive but that hasn’t be tried.
Gonna risk going a bit against the grain here…
I have a lot of empathy for their situation.
I don’t know what the solution is but it isn’t the status quo. A lot of the west coast cities are having a disproportionate problem with homeless. It’s not clear if people are bussing their homeless or the housing prices or what.
The amount of trash generated by these homeless camps is nuts and ruins virtually every public space. In Portland, it is common to find hypodermic needles littered in the parks. You’ll walk past people on the sidewalk passed out with a needle in their arm or actively doing drugs. Human excrement on the sidewalk. I wish I had some solution but the current situation sucks for everyone.
A lot of the west coast cities are having a disproportionate problem with homeless.
Prices go up, rents go up, wages stay flat.
Oops! Where did all the homeless people come from?!
The amount of trash generated by these homeless camps is nuts and ruins virtually every public space.
We live in a society of disposable things, but we don’t provide homeless people with trash service.
You don’t see the trash you generate, because the city carts it away. Homeless people are forced to live in their own squalor because the city doesn’t cart it away.
Give them homes. That’s the solution. It’s actually that simple.
A studio apartment can be over $3,000 in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, there are like five homeless people on every block of the city I lived in with five-digit population. The city would need to find some way to seize land, without calling for a vote, in order to have enough housing for everyone since rent control has been voted against for over a decade.
The main issue is that people would vote to drive the homeless into the sea before they would vote to house them.
It’s far more complicated than that for many of the homeless. A really high proportion have chronic mental health problems like schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder. These people cannot maintain even a basic apartment. Fires are common. As are faeces smeared on the walls, major structural damage, dead animals, bullet holes and use of firearms inside the premises. Throwing a mentally unwell person into a home to fend for themselves doesn’t work. The mental health treatment has to come first. It can take months, if not years, to help them out of their hole.
Another significant portion of the homeless have chronic addiction. In addiction treatment, we say that “a locking door is a death sentence” because the LAST thing you want is to give a junky unsupervised privacy to shoot up as often as they like. Apartments often turn into local hubs for dealing and sex work. This attracts all kinds of unsavory characters and crime - especially violent crime. You don’t want to know what a junky would be willing to do to get a fix. A major part of this problem is called “destigmatization.” This is a great documentary on how it has so thoroughly failed in Vancouver, specifically.
Both groups require intensive support before being given housing. Not after and not at the same time.
The mental health treatment has to come first.
No. Housing comes first. You cannot treat mental health or addiction while the patient is experiencing the inhumane conditions of homelessness.
the LAST thing you want is to give a junky unsupervised privacy to shoot up as often as they like. Apartments often turn into local hubs for dealing and sex work. This attracts all kinds of unsavory characters and crime
So you think the streets are better? Believe it or not, all this still happens on the street, except now there is no guarantee of food, shelter, safety, or property. I’m sure the constant threat of starvation, death by exposure, getting robbed, or being sexually assaulted is really beneficial to mental health. Do you really think being on the street stops addicts from using as much as they want? No privacy on the street? These people are already invisible. And no, if you don’t have a door that locks, you don’t become immune to overdosing.
Shameful.
I’m with you that that is inappropriate in public, and west coast cities are being hit super hard. The dirt little secret is that many interior cities do also run their homeless out.
But the research shows the fastest, most sure fire way to reduce the problem is to just give folks a permanent address that is safe.
Every effort should be made to give these folks a home, even if that home is some sort of rapid mass manufacture box with a door that locks.
I do acknowledge that the states on the west coast shouldn’t be the only ones that need to follow that approach, and there clearly isn’t a solution for that. I.e. a state should be rapidly obligated to house IT’S homeless, not ALL OF AMERICA’S homeless… But that is a very complicated layer
It seems like any state by state solution will fall prey to states that want to displace their homeless population instead of providing attainable housing. If we lived in a reasonable society the Federal government would intervene, but no dice.
