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.
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.