I’d love to mate, but I honestly don’t know how. One thing I have to come to realise is that simply throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. Norway, London, NYC, and California both spends billions each year on homelessness and the problem is only getting worse every year in all those places.
Maybe a good place to start would be opening up free sanitariums again where homeless people with mental issues could be housed, as sadly the streets have become the new dumping ground for people with severe mental illness.
Beyond that, am not sure, besides a total dismantling of capitalism.
The answer is trivial.
Stop spending billions on a “war on drugs” and make sure people have houses and healthcare (including mental health) unconditionally with no ridiculous hoops or welfare traps 10 years before they become a street junkie.
Just because some places misused a bunch of money doing very stupid things with it doesn’t validate ignoring the solution.
It’s not nearly so trivial. Having lived in Norway for many years, a country which does have unconditional free healthcare (including mental health), and free access to housing, they still have a large homeless population and plenty of street crime.
Norway has much much lower homeless proportion than more neoliberal countries. It is a prime example of this strategy working.
The sanitoriums were closed for good reason. Bad as homelessness is, it is better than the abuse of sanitoriums.
Not a sanitorium, but i know someone who was in an orphanage, they beat kids with a metal chimney brush if they put their head on the pillow when they slept. This earned them lots of awards for how nice all the kids beds were. Sanitoriums were reportable just as bad, but I don’t have such close accounts.
@bluGill @TheTango @Peruvian_Skies @trias10
The sanatoriums were horrendous and closed by both Canadian and American gov’ts in the late 60’s - early 70’s for good reason. The problem was the gov’ts didn’t put programs in place to help those people live outside the walls … essentially the same thing they do with prisoners now.
Guaranteed incomes, stable housing and support networks would clear up many of the “issues”, but too many whine about their tax dollars being spent on people in need.
Beyond that, am not sure, besides a total dismantling of capitalism.
You say that like it’s not the actual solution.
No one would be happier than me with this solution, but it will never realistically happen in our lifetimes. And even if it somehow came to happen eventually, given the entrenchment of current elites, it would only happen with an immense cost in human lives and violence, and a massive drop in living standards in the immediate aftermath before some utopia is created.
Current day -> neo Soviet revolution -> Mad Max -> the last of us? -> ??? -> Bernie Sanders Utopia
