I want to help the homeless.... The truly homeless. I think most people do. Unfortunately, today’s homeless are largely career homeless falling into several categories: druggies, mentally diminished, and criminals.
True homelessness is usually a temporary condition. When you fund and accept something, it grows. That’s what we have now.
We need to care for our veterans, open asylums again, dump the druggies onto open arable land and tell them to farm periodically checking on them.
We need a worker’s corp. They can be trained to repair the country’s failing infrastructure, etc.
Women with small children can form communes to help one another so that some can work outside to support those caring for the kids.
Temporary housing for families in need and retraining if necessary.... With time limits...
All with consequences.
I’m sure we can think of some things.
I think the very first step is to think of them as categories and then remove each category that you can, for instance get the mentally ill into the mental hospitals, then go to the next category, drug addicts, they are criminals doing criminal offenses, which means there are many options we can use for them and they will have to comply, same with the alcoholics and public drinking homeless, once the herd is thinned out and the public can see the neediness of what is left, then the public will be more open to finding solutions to deal with those who are homeless and don’t want to be.
Once the problem is seen as manageable and the public sees that solutions are available then they will open their hearts to helping the truly needy homeless with creative ideas, thin the herd, reduce the street mob by 70%, and people will be more willing to help the remaining, right now people are overwhelmed and fed-up, they just want it to go away.
This process will be helped by bringing back the pressure of ‘vagrancy’, which made street living much less appealing, not to mention that it meant the public areas could be cleared of the winos and hobos, who used to be limited to unseen areas away from the unknowing public.