“Their own fathers don’t care about them.
“
There’s actually very few of what you’d call mental wards. When I was a child there was nothing like the “homeless” problem downtown. The problem isn’t homelessness. It’s mental illness and drug use. The police would arrest for vagrancy and then, if a judge found the person was mentally ill, he went to an asylum. (Yes, there were lots of problems with this but probably not nearly as many as movies would have had us believe. Movies are not reality even when the pretend to be.) The end result of stopping this procedure was that all the institutions specialized in handling the mentally ill closed. They turned lose the inmates and they began living under bridges. (SO much improved. Thank you ALCU.)
The other reason there wasn’t a homeless problem was there were flop houses where you could rent a room for anywhere from pennies to dollars. These were older buildings all over downtown that had been long paid off. LBJ’s great society mowed them to the ground and replaced them with Soviet style apartment buildings and then subsidized the rent. The unsubsidized portion was too high for the average man to pay it by doing odd jobs, so those who were not mentally ill also became homeless.
Yup. Most of the ‘cuckoo nests’ were shut down in the 70’s. Vagrants were usually run out of town.
💯👍
You nailed it.
Laws have changed also. Any little misdemeanor, or more than one, can be listed as a felony. Anyone with a felony is blacklisted from shelters and other benefits.
Addicts are prohibited from shelter also soo...back on the streets they go.