Depressing fact: Most of the homeless people you see acting all crazy and talking to themselves all the time behaved normally when they started being homeless. It’s spending years in complete isolation, being constantly ignored by everyone around you and having no one to talk to that makes you act like this.
To add into that, most homeless are just normal people that fell on hard times, you won’t see them cause they don’t want to be a bother. You see the crazies because… Well they’re crazy. Gigantic assholes like musk assume that since you see crazy homeless people wandering outside, then obviously ALL homeless people are crazy violent lunatics. He is the smartest person in the world after all.
People forget that not every homeless person is just someone temporarily down on their luck. Iirc that $20b figure is just housing the homeless, which doesn’t fix things for people who are mentally ill, drug addicts, or both, and that’s like 60-80% of the chronically homeless.
It’s a massively complex issue with no simple fix.
You’re right, a 100% fix of the problem is not simple or easy. But there’s a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that we can tackle to make huge strides.
While drugs and/or mental illness may be involved in a high percentage of the chronically homeless, the chronically homeless only account for somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3 of all homeless. So housing the other homeless would still take care of the needs of ~80% of all homeless, give or take. Get single-payer healthcare up and running to prevent more people from ending up in those situations, and change from a retributive justice system to one that cares about rehabilitation, and suddenly we’ve got a society that actually cares about people, and would cost less to run while we’re at it.
But, with a functioning safety net, people won’t feel like they have no other choice but to work a shit job for shit wages, and the oligarchs can’t have that.
Depressing fact: Most of the homeless people you see acting all crazy and talking to themselves all the time behaved normally when they started being homeless. It’s spending years in complete isolation, being constantly ignored by everyone around you and having no one to talk to that makes you act like this.
I wouldn’t jump to that though. Most working homeless live out of a car or couch surf, while not doing that.
To add into that, most homeless are just normal people that fell on hard times, you won’t see them cause they don’t want to be a bother. You see the crazies because… Well they’re crazy. Gigantic assholes like musk assume that since you see crazy homeless people wandering outside, then obviously ALL homeless people are crazy violent lunatics. He is the smartest person in the world after all.
I mean, yeah - it’s that AND the meth.
And heroin, and severe mental illness.
People forget that not every homeless person is just someone temporarily down on their luck. Iirc that $20b figure is just housing the homeless, which doesn’t fix things for people who are mentally ill, drug addicts, or both, and that’s like 60-80% of the chronically homeless.
It’s a massively complex issue with no simple fix.
You’re right, a 100% fix of the problem is not simple or easy. But there’s a whole lot of low-hanging fruit that we can tackle to make huge strides.
While drugs and/or mental illness may be involved in a high percentage of the chronically homeless, the chronically homeless only account for somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3 of all homeless. So housing the other homeless would still take care of the needs of ~80% of all homeless, give or take. Get single-payer healthcare up and running to prevent more people from ending up in those situations, and change from a retributive justice system to one that cares about rehabilitation, and suddenly we’ve got a society that actually cares about people, and would cost less to run while we’re at it.
But, with a functioning safety net, people won’t feel like they have no other choice but to work a shit job for shit wages, and the oligarchs can’t have that.