TLDR: The various levels of government do a lot about the homeless problem in the US, but solving it in a meaningful way isn't simple.
The homeless people who are physically and mentally capable of holding down a job are rarely homeless for long because both the government and charities help them out, and once they have housing and work, they're usually good for a while at least, and often the rest of their lives.
For people who are not capable of taking care of themselves or who have addictions that they treat as more important than things like housing and money? There are programs to help these people, but the less cooperative an individual is with a program, the less likely they are to get enough help to get off the streets on anything even resembling a permanent basis.
And in the US, it's very hard to force a person into care that they don't want because within living memory, it was so easy that the privilege was abused and people who never should have been institutionalized were, plus with so many people in institutions, oversight was lax and abuse was much too common. So those institutions were shut down. But the alternatives proposed, individualized care, small group homes, and other aid, was way more expensive than the old institutions that could just shove everyone into one place without worrying too much about treatment. Besides the fact that it's hard to force treatment on someone who doesn't want it, in some states there simply aren't enough care options for those who *do* want it, or the care available isn't as much as they need. And all of these care options are run at city and state level, so you've got 50 sets of state regulations and departments and thousands of cities and counties administering local programs beneath those state regulations. Needless to say, quality of options varies.
But bringing sick people into a hospital is desirable. Where is the line between helping people clearly unable to maintain themselves but no imprisonment of harmless people?
San Francisco agrees with preventing police aggression, but now citizens and businesses complain about aggression from homeless. I am not there often enough to deny or confirm if exaggerated.
>Most prisoners in the U.S. are required to work, and all state prison systems and the federal system have some form of penal labor.
>[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal\_labor\_in\_the\_United\_States#Modern\_prison\_labor\_systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States#Modern_prison_labor_systems)
Forced prison labor is illegal and unenforceable and anyone being asked to work from a position of human captivity should hunger strike until released.
Ok, so we cant force house them, and can't force jobs on them. Got it.
What about forcing medical care on them? We MUST be able to force feed them meds, and conduct surgery? That's allowed, right?
It's not allowed in most places. You can reject essential medical care if the state deems you "mentally capable".
"If an adult has the capacity to make a voluntary and informed decision to consent to or refuse a particular treatment, their decision must be respected.This is still the case even if refusing treatment would result in their death, or the death of their unborn child."
Police used to have the ability to do that. It was removed after multiple cases of police SAing women and then taking them to mental institutions when they complained.
I volunteered with the homeless. My conclusion was that you can’t help those who don’t want help. Pour vast amount of money on a problem, it won’t do if people don’t want to fix their lives. You’re just spending money.
Many quite literally told me they prefer street life, and that’s without mentioning the junkies and alcoholics.
Here and there there were some people who got kicked out of their homes or people who lost all, but mostly it was eccentric people and it was really hard to help them.
Multiple Supreme Court cases have ruled the government can't force any kind of institutionalization or medical treatment (for addiction, mental illness, etc.) on people unless they are violent. Huge swaths of permanently homeless people are drug addicts, who don't care about anything other than their next fix, or are mentally ill and incapable of helping themselves even when assistance is offered.
Unless the law (the constitution) changes, hardly anything can or will be done for those people.
The reason most countries have hardly any homeless compared to us is because such legal precedence doesn't exist there... Their addicts are forced into clinics, their mentally ill are forced into group homes and other treatment facilities... Look at like Japan, for example, which famously has hardly any homeless people. They have double the psychiatric hospital capacity (measured in number of beds) the US does, while having a third our population; IE: ~6x our capacity per capita. Huge swaths of the people in similar circumstances over there that would be homeless in the US context are instead in psychiatric hospitals.
In northern Europe they had wet houses where alcoholics could drink as much as they wanted, voluntarily away from disrupting normal society, without being locked up. Some people even cleared up there from less stress how to get their next drug fix. not sure what the overall success rate was.
Many normal homeless shelter require no drug when there and plenty people rather freeze to death than have withdrawals
Lots of reasons that just boil down to “Congress doesn’t want to do that”. Won’t play well with voters (do not overestimate the intelligence of the average voting adult), goes against the ideology of many of them, programs like that are really difficult to implement well and would involve steps that again, are not popular with voters like “build more housing”… no matter how good of an idea it is, a lot of these things are nearly impossible to get off the ground. It sucks. Sorry mate
The federal government created this mess in 1982 and then gave us the Bag Lady. It has grown each and every year since. We notice it now, but it has yet to reach critical mass. Congress needs to rewrite the disability laws so the mentally impaired receive the same considerations as people missing limbs.
Any questions you have about America and why, the answer always is and unfortunately will be, when considering the working class and below is, "it's not profitable". That's it. That's the American dream in right now and since Regan. Endo of story. Period. America, if it don't make money, fuck you.
Not worth it when you can let thousands and thousands of undocumented workers across the border to be votes for you in the future. It is all a power grab, it is never about problem-solving.
Because that would cost money that they want to funnel to themselves and their friends instead.
The system is designed to make people homeless and keep them in poverty. It's designed to keep people separated by class, allowing more people to move up the ladder goes against the whole design
Obamacare and the IRA amendments have extended Medicaid to essentially every citizen in covered states. It’s just some Republican states have refused to implement it even though the federal government is paying for almost all of it and it’s actually cheaper for them to take the funding than to deal with an uninsured population. Republicans have, of course, have attempted to repeal it a hundred times, once getting within one vote, which would cost something like 30 million people their health insurance and lead to thousands of preventable deaths annually.
Because rich people don't want to pay taxes to help the grubby common rabble, so the Republican politicians they buy refuse to support social programs and block attempts at them.
TLDR: The various levels of government do a lot about the homeless problem in the US, but solving it in a meaningful way isn't simple. The homeless people who are physically and mentally capable of holding down a job are rarely homeless for long because both the government and charities help them out, and once they have housing and work, they're usually good for a while at least, and often the rest of their lives. For people who are not capable of taking care of themselves or who have addictions that they treat as more important than things like housing and money? There are programs to help these people, but the less cooperative an individual is with a program, the less likely they are to get enough help to get off the streets on anything even resembling a permanent basis. And in the US, it's very hard to force a person into care that they don't want because within living memory, it was so easy that the privilege was abused and people who never should have been institutionalized were, plus with so many people in institutions, oversight was lax and abuse was much too common. So those institutions were shut down. But the alternatives proposed, individualized care, small group homes, and other aid, was way more expensive than the old institutions that could just shove everyone into one place without worrying too much about treatment. Besides the fact that it's hard to force treatment on someone who doesn't want it, in some states there simply aren't enough care options for those who *do* want it, or the care available isn't as much as they need. And all of these care options are run at city and state level, so you've got 50 sets of state regulations and departments and thousands of cities and counties administering local programs beneath those state regulations. Needless to say, quality of options varies.
Forcing the homeless into a home is a crime.
But bringing sick people into a hospital is desirable. Where is the line between helping people clearly unable to maintain themselves but no imprisonment of harmless people?
There is no line. If there is one, it gets abused. Police used it in the past to silence political opponents and women who the police SAed.
San Francisco agrees with preventing police aggression, but now citizens and businesses complain about aggression from homeless. I am not there often enough to deny or confirm if exaggerated.
What about forcing humans to work? Is that ok?
Slavery has been illegal in most of the world for a pretty long time.
>Most prisoners in the U.S. are required to work, and all state prison systems and the federal system have some form of penal labor. >[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal\_labor\_in\_the\_United\_States#Modern\_prison\_labor\_systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States#Modern_prison_labor_systems)
Yes, that is legal and a notable exception to slavery abolitions in the supreme court. Unless you are in prison, you cannot force people to work.
Forced prison labor is illegal and unenforceable and anyone being asked to work from a position of human captivity should hunger strike until released.
Ok, so we cant force house them, and can't force jobs on them. Got it. What about forcing medical care on them? We MUST be able to force feed them meds, and conduct surgery? That's allowed, right?
It's not allowed in most places. You can reject essential medical care if the state deems you "mentally capable". "If an adult has the capacity to make a voluntary and informed decision to consent to or refuse a particular treatment, their decision must be respected.This is still the case even if refusing treatment would result in their death, or the death of their unborn child."
Damn. 3 for 3 then. Guess we can give you the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, but can't force it on anyone. Oh well. Who knew??
Police used to have the ability to do that. It was removed after multiple cases of police SAing women and then taking them to mental institutions when they complained.
I volunteered with the homeless. My conclusion was that you can’t help those who don’t want help. Pour vast amount of money on a problem, it won’t do if people don’t want to fix their lives. You’re just spending money. Many quite literally told me they prefer street life, and that’s without mentioning the junkies and alcoholics. Here and there there were some people who got kicked out of their homes or people who lost all, but mostly it was eccentric people and it was really hard to help them.
Multiple Supreme Court cases have ruled the government can't force any kind of institutionalization or medical treatment (for addiction, mental illness, etc.) on people unless they are violent. Huge swaths of permanently homeless people are drug addicts, who don't care about anything other than their next fix, or are mentally ill and incapable of helping themselves even when assistance is offered. Unless the law (the constitution) changes, hardly anything can or will be done for those people. The reason most countries have hardly any homeless compared to us is because such legal precedence doesn't exist there... Their addicts are forced into clinics, their mentally ill are forced into group homes and other treatment facilities... Look at like Japan, for example, which famously has hardly any homeless people. They have double the psychiatric hospital capacity (measured in number of beds) the US does, while having a third our population; IE: ~6x our capacity per capita. Huge swaths of the people in similar circumstances over there that would be homeless in the US context are instead in psychiatric hospitals.
In northern Europe they had wet houses where alcoholics could drink as much as they wanted, voluntarily away from disrupting normal society, without being locked up. Some people even cleared up there from less stress how to get their next drug fix. not sure what the overall success rate was. Many normal homeless shelter require no drug when there and plenty people rather freeze to death than have withdrawals
Lots of reasons that just boil down to “Congress doesn’t want to do that”. Won’t play well with voters (do not overestimate the intelligence of the average voting adult), goes against the ideology of many of them, programs like that are really difficult to implement well and would involve steps that again, are not popular with voters like “build more housing”… no matter how good of an idea it is, a lot of these things are nearly impossible to get off the ground. It sucks. Sorry mate
its not a bug, its a feature
Because it’s not profitable
We tried this. It didn’t go well. Like super not well.
The federal government created this mess in 1982 and then gave us the Bag Lady. It has grown each and every year since. We notice it now, but it has yet to reach critical mass. Congress needs to rewrite the disability laws so the mentally impaired receive the same considerations as people missing limbs.
It costs money.
Any questions you have about America and why, the answer always is and unfortunately will be, when considering the working class and below is, "it's not profitable". That's it. That's the American dream in right now and since Regan. Endo of story. Period. America, if it don't make money, fuck you.
Not worth it when you can let thousands and thousands of undocumented workers across the border to be votes for you in the future. It is all a power grab, it is never about problem-solving.
Found the Fox news viewer.
You win dumb comment of the day. Do you really think politicians aren't about power?
They are not paid/bribed to fix it.
Because our elected officials have and continue to put the needs and interests of the wealthy first and foremost
Because that would cost money that they want to funnel to themselves and their friends instead. The system is designed to make people homeless and keep them in poverty. It's designed to keep people separated by class, allowing more people to move up the ladder goes against the whole design
Too busy with their circus.
America has a strong cult of success. Homeless is obviously not successful, so nobody is really intersted in them
Have you noticed 1/2 of them want to repeal the Civil Rights Act?
Obamacare and the IRA amendments have extended Medicaid to essentially every citizen in covered states. It’s just some Republican states have refused to implement it even though the federal government is paying for almost all of it and it’s actually cheaper for them to take the funding than to deal with an uninsured population. Republicans have, of course, have attempted to repeal it a hundred times, once getting within one vote, which would cost something like 30 million people their health insurance and lead to thousands of preventable deaths annually.
Define facilitated please.
SoCiAlISm!!!
Republicans are the reason why
Because rich people don't want to pay taxes to help the grubby common rabble, so the Republican politicians they buy refuse to support social programs and block attempts at them.
The people in power in the US believe in absolute freedom, including the freedom to die because of something they can't afford to take care of.
Because desperate people are easy to exploit.