How would you end homelessness ?

I don't have answers, just questions.What do you do about the ones that don't want to go to a facility or shelter? Those who say they can't deal with all the "rules"? Those who don't want to be told what to do? Those who just want their "freedom"? I know mental illness affects a good number of the homeless and treatment and care would make a difference but how do you help those who don't want help?

I do believe it starts with counseling and mental health assistance. You cannot MAKE someone take assistance, but you can make it illegal to be vagrant. If a person can not or will not take responsibility for themselves and insist on living "free" they need to learn that "free" is a luxury. Through counseling and mental remediation the ones who just want to milk the system can be weeded out. It would have to be a rigorous and unbiased system that makes being homeless not an option. You either accept help and work towards being self supporting or you accept consequences. For those who need help, there is no ONE answer. You have to look at the individual and figure out how they came to be homeless and take it from there. You do this through health screening, mental health evaluation, and counseling.

Democracy only works when everyone participates. We need to gently and sometimes not so gently lead the homeless to participate in our society and not be a burden.

Don't get me wrong. I believe there are homeless people out there who really want help and NEED help and they probably are the majority of the homeless we have. But we have to do something about those who just want to opt out and live on the streets and then expect society to take care of them with no strings when the going gets tough.

voltagain ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

This has been tried recently in my city.  A law was passed making camping on public property illegal - so basically, outlawing the homeless camps.

The law was immediately challenged in court and is currently not allowed to be enforced.  Making homelessness illegal is not really workable - as volt pointed out, not everyone is able to use the shelters.  Where are those people supposed to go?  It's a complex problem for sure.

Beautiful story, voltagain. Thanks for sharing...it is encouraging. 

+1 to all of this, as someone who ran a legal clinic in a shelter.

This is a perfect example of how difficult it can be for somebody to overcome homelessness - it's not as simple as telling somebody to get a job (which I've seen said on this board). I'm glad you were able to make a better life for yourself.  

When I was a kid homeless men were the down on their luck Vietnam vet. Now the homeless in my city are mostly men who got out of prison and can't get a job so they just stand around all day drinking and doing drugs. They don't even beg for money so I guess they all get a check or something? The few people that do beg for money have their regular corner you can see that at daily and I figure have a govt provided apt they go home to at night. The other category of homeless are young women who had kids without jobs but my city does a good job of providing transitional housing for them in motels. I've seen very few homeless people with mental problems.

I think homelessness results out of a cycle of poverty and lack of education so these people made poor choices with their life. My city has torn down most of the public housing apartment blocks in favor of section 8 vouchers. However there is is still a need for a lot more transitional housing but no neighborhood wants it in their hood so there's always a roadblock to turning a building into one.

My city recently made a law so that employers are not allowed to have a check box on job applications asking if you have been arrested or in prison because they see it as discrimination. The ex-con office was renamed "office of returning citizens". Dogs and iphones are provided to the homeless.

I read a newspaper article recently that talked about a large warehouse that was being torn down. Inside it was those small storage units. Apparently a lot of homeless people used those units to store all their possessions from their last apt.

Drug overdoes are a big problem in my city. People OD in parks. I often see ambulances attending to a homeless person which I assume is drug related. They get to use our hospitals free of charge. I walk by people high on drugs just standing on the sidewalk. So I don't know how any drug rehab program can be successful when we're dealing with a population who spend their day standing outside with each other all day long. They're bored and unhappy so this gives them some relief I guess. My city has a big problem of large groups of them congregating around in parks all day. So benches have been removed from parks. Having a tent in a park is illegal because the park service enforces unauthorized camping.

I think part of the problem is that some of the "rules" are ridiculous. No one else would put up with them, but homeless people are ungrateful or crazy if they won't.


I used to work at what was widely considered the best shelter in my area. The rules included families being separated (men living in one area and women and kids in another). Dads couldn't help with getting kids ready for the day or ready for bed. Because of this moms with kids were always the last ones to the dining room in the morning and food was very limited by then. Young boys were separated from their moms and sent to the men's dorm. If I faced a choice of having a 9/10 yr old boy sent to live by himself in a men's dorm without me, I'd stay out of a shelter, too. Anyone with a food allergy was told they could not be accommodated.

I think it's really easy to judge people who don't want to follow rules as not wanting help. But I think the truth is a lot of peas would balk at the rules of most shelters.

i probably should have clarified my question.  i was not talking about families.  i was thinking about individual homeless.   individuals who have been on the streets for years and have lived on their own terms for so long that they can't or don't want to be helped.  

Part of the point of my response is that this is a really harmful stereotype.

It's very easy for middle class people to erase the problem of homelessness by saying "those people don't want help." When really chronically homeless single males are in fact a small percentage of the homelessness epidemic.

Perpetuating that stereotype does nothing to address the problem.

The middle class mindset is very much 1) beggars can't be choosers (i.e. If homeless people don't accept whatever rules and conditions are attached to help, then they deserve to be homeless) and 2) homeless people choose to be homeless.

Until we, as a society, start discussing homelessness in ways that don't play to that mindset, we won't solve the problem.

i guess my question is more rhetorical.  i know homeless single males (and females) represent a small percentage, but, they are still part of homeless.  even if we can help 99.9% of the homeless, what can we really do with those that we can't? 

we absolutely should not ignore the problem!!!  not at all.  the last recession, the housing crash, the loss of jobs to outsourcing or movement of factories overseas, vets coming back from war, catastrophic illnesses not covered by health care or no health----all these have contributed to the epidemic levels of homelessness.  homelessness is no longer just a guy laying in the street.  it is families living in cars.  people living in broken down RVs lining the streets.  people living in tent cities on all over the place.  i know there are solutions to ending homelessness for 99.9% of those people.  

my question was/is, how do you take a person off the street who doesn't want to leave the street (for whatever reason)?  and i'm not just stereotyping for the sake of my question.  what if there really is a person like that?  FOR EXAMPLE:  there is a chronically homeless man in my neighborhood.  his name is Bob.  it really is his name.  Bob has a drinking problem and a dog.  people feed his dog and sometimes foster it when Bob is passed out on the sidewalk or wherever.  people have talked to Bob, brought him food, given him money, sleeping bag,  or tried to find him  a place to stay.  Bob will take a temporary aid but he won't leave the street.  he says he needs help with his drinking but when neighbors offer him help take him to a rehab or to a shelter, he won't budge.  he refuses to do anything further than take money or food.  i know all this because there is an epic and ongoing "how can we help Bob" post on our NextDoor.  when i originally asked my question, i was thinking of Bob. i know, on the whole, we as a society can probably help most homeless people find a way out but what about the Bobs of the world?  i'm not assuming or stereotyping a bunch of people.  i just "know" of one who will only accept so much help and still remain on the street.      

Money could be less of an object if we wouldn't accept people making multi-tens of millions per year in take home pay while others sleep in the cold and rain.

I would raise taxes by having more brackets w/incredibly high rates at the top so that no one would take home more than $10 million/year to fund jobs for social workers, public safety workers, etc. 

Win-Win.  Put money to use diminishing homelessness AND put money to work employing people to help us get there. 

Or we could keep doing what we're doing and letting any to all of that money go out of the economy at will and into foreign assets an foreign homes, services, businesses, yachts, condos, parties, casinos, etc.