What you don’t hear about is the successful Seattle experiment with chronic street alcoholics. For once, they had the brilliant notion of tending to street drunks with *zero* emphasis on reforming them; instead, the *sole* reason for doing this was to save a LOT of taxpayer money.
Street drunks are stupidly expensive, consuming huge amounts of police time, emergency room services, and other drains on the public purse, because living on the street is hard and destructive. Many cities give up and just try to deport them, but this seldom works.
So Seattle had the brilliant idea to just buy an old hotel, refurbish it a little, and put the street drunks in there for free, just to keep them off the streets. The building has a manager and a nurse to tend to their lesser health problems.
The money savings were close to a million dollars in the first year. And because by the time they are street drunks there is almost zero chance for them to “reform”, nobody was really harmed.
There were some reasonable suggestions that the city could even provide them nutritional food, and maybe free grain ethanol and mixers, so they didn’t need to beg at all.
Ironically, it was unexpectedly discovered that with just having a place to stay, the tendency was for them to drink less on their own.
But in the final analysis, there are just too many people out there who insist on trying to force street drunks to reform. They refuse in most places to permit such experiments because they object to it on moral grounds, even though it would save a lot of money.
Actually it’s not an experiment. Around here, in the old days it was called the County Farm or poor house. Operated basicly the same way, Run by the County Commission.
Then they decided it was mean to feed and house them.