busyThe first solution to homelessness is simply to put people in homes. Society needs to guarantee people a place to stay, if it doesn't want them camping out and perhaps freezing to death. Shelters don't count, and neither does any other kind of monitored living. Those interventions drive people away from help. They need their own apartment or house with the same freedoms and dignities as everyone else.
The second main thing the homeless need is income. That means jobs for those who can work, which is a lot of them; or some kind of public assistance for those who can't work. This is much cheaper than leaving them on the street to subsist through begging, stealing, or emergency services.
The third thing they need is resources. That includes everything from supplies to health care. Most homeless aid focuses on very small, short-term things like food or emergency medical care. That might keep people from dying right in front of you but it does not solve the problem. You have to make it possible for them to build up the components of a healthy life.
And you have to do all this in ways that the homeless population will find attractive because it meets their needs, and not shy away from due to strings attached. People don't risk death from exposure for no reason. If they're sleeping in the snow, it is because there are not enough shelters and/or those places are literally worse than death.
It's something I write about, periodically, because some of my characters are homeless. Danso and his family were homeless for months. Turq has been on the street even longer, and it's hard for him to accept help even when the offerings are safe and not judgmental. So I keep an eye out for ways to address these kinds of problems. How do you meet the emergency needs, how do you give people a route back into society, how do you get people back into homes, and especially how do you fix the root causes that drive people into homelessness in the first place? Solutions exist, a few places are using them, but most just can't be arsed.
September 30 2016, 02:33:06 UTC 4 years ago
Also, a lot of them are insane.
Shelters don't work very well because it forces them to deal with other homeless people who will try to abuse them. You'd basically have to put them in prison, or a mental hospital, or some other heavily supervised living situation. Against their will, because most of them would hate that.
Well...
September 30 2016, 02:45:54 UTC 4 years ago
Utah has used this method to cut their rate of homelessness down to a tenth of what it was. A few other places are trying similar programs. It's not perfect, but it seems to be making enormous improvements.
>> Also, a lot of them are insane. <<
That is a separate, although related, problem. Preventing people with mental disabilities from becoming homeless requires a combination of readily accessible mental health care, support services, and options for living arragements that are secure without being undesirable to them. There are places which do these things, just not enough.
>> Shelters don't work very well because it forces them to deal with other homeless people who will try to abuse them.<<
That is true.
>> You'd basically have to put them in prison, <<
Which is precisely how America currently handles its mentally disabled people, turning them into livestock. The vast majority of inmates either come in with, or quickly acquire, mental problems which make it difficult or impossible for them to live independently. And that's not an accident.
>> or a mental hospital, or some other heavily supervised living situation. Against their will, because most of them would hate that. <<
The circumstances under which it is reasonable to violate someone's agency like that are extremely limited. Mostly society does it out of convenience, which is illegal, but as long as the targets are largely powerless it is rarely prosecuted.
There are many different options for living situations which provide a little or a lot of support for people with mental disabilities, ranging from less formal to more formal in structure. They don't all have to look like institutions. Intentional neighboring is one good example, which is what Waverly does in the Skylark Apartment Building. She manages labile mood with community, because she tried medication and it quashed her creativity, a common complaint with psychotropic drugs.