I’ve worked helping homeless people in the past on many occasions, had friends whos family members were homeless, had homeless friends, and had even been homeless myself for a small amount of time. There are a lot of people that are homeless through no fault of their own, there are people that are homeless because of drug abuse (which perpetuates the cycle). Both of these people need more access to the help that can be provided to them, but I mainly wanted to talk about a third category of homelessness: People that are homeless by choice.
People that are homeless by choice have told me that they enjoy the lifestyle and enjoy the freedom that it brings despite the negatives. They actively rejected help from people and expressed their desires to me to intend living that lifestyle forever. While I think every person has the right to live their own life the way they see fit, homelessness often has negatives to the people that aren’t homeless. Feces and needles in the streets, breaking and entering into homes, garages, sheds, vandalizing and burning them down in the process. Of course all homeless people aren’t like that but the point still remains: a healthy society generally doesn’t have homeless people. How do you achieve a balance to allow the people whom are homeless by choice to live in a way they see fit while also minimizing the perceived issues of homelessness? What are your thoughts on homeless people?
I ask these questions in good faith and I hope you also do the same. Thank you for your thoughts and opinions.
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You ask what “society” does with “homeless people” as though “homeless people” aren’t part of “society”
Maybe it’s just me but I didn’t interpret the title that way at all.
There are political premises embedded in the framing. It’s an intractable question up until you ask homeless people as though they were, like, people. Dehumanization and exclusion of homeless people from discussions of how to help them are the norm.
Public restrooms and safe injection rooms are a good start; here it seems to work. Also, do people who are homeless by choice have the same behaviors or needs as the other two groups, statistically? That would be interesting to research…
I am happy to hear that it those solutions work in your area, but I have also have vivid memories of seeing a homeless man shitting 15ft away from a public restroom that was clean and accessible. Not to mention how filthy restrooms visited by the homeless are. Obviously not saying that more public restrooms aren’t worth building, just saying that sometimes solutions are unfortunately more nuanced than just throwing more money for public services.
That would be very interesting to research. From my experience talking with them directly, they seem to be more nomadic whereas people that are homeless through no fault of their own will tend to stay in the city they grew up it, or became homeless in.
Thank you for your comment.
Either you pony up the resources to help people or you deal with seeing them shit in the streets or making public restrooms ‘filthy’. Even for the ones you do reach, there will be some who are not willing to change their behavior, which means you get to decide as a member of society how much it’s worth to have public restrooms clean - is it worth employing more staff to clean these restrooms more often (or hopefully, more robust infrastructure that can self-clean or can be cleaned by robots or is more resistant to becoming ‘filthy’). Unfortunately there isn’t some magic pill that solves everything for free. Fortunately there are an absurd amount of resources in the world, and this is absolutely something that can be solved.
We need to stop being angry that people choose a lifestyle that’s different from our own. People who choose to be homeless are a fraction of a fraction. Let them.
Before the entire earth had been settled, a person could be a vagrant and simply go and live out in the wild. I could see this being acceptable if that’s what people want. Hermits have a long history in human society. As long as they aren’t hurting anyone I don’t see why they shouldn’t be allowed the space they want to camp.
I agree 100%. I was just wondering how to balance their ability to live their lifestyle and the public’s generally negative perception of them.
Is it a problem that needs to be solved? For any given homeless population, maybe 1% are like this.
If you or anyone else were to solve homelessness to 99%… you’d rightly be a hero. And the tiny remainder, you could leave them alone the way they’d want.
Likely though, quite a few who have this attitude didn’t daydream as a child of becoming a hobo and riding the rails. They only discovered this after inadvertently becoming homeless. So, if you were to reduce homelessness in general, you’d see even fewer of these people (they just don’t get the chance to discover they like it). How many fewer I can’t even speculate on, but it should be significant.
While true, it’s sort of moot. The people in San Francisco who are complaining about homelessness and its ill effects aren’t complaining about the effects of 3 homeless people throughout the entire city. They’re complaining about 20,000 homeless.
If it were reduced to 3 (or even only to 300), then chances are they might not even notice enough to complain. The people who desire to remain homeless, whatever their actual numbers, can’t rise high enough for this to be a concern.
It’s a problem I think about extensively. I hope I’ve provided some insight.
Your comment was helpful for providing insight, particularly the line I quoted above. Thanks.
What would you say is a potential solution for those 20,000 homeless for example?
I solved homelessness about 6 years ago. Turns out it was a math problem. I have no idea who to talk to about actually implementing the solution.
If we constrain the problem to the North American mainland (Hawaii is a little bizarre) or perhaps to continental Europe, then the true problem of homelessness is a game theory issue. There are multiple jurisdictions, often of many different political flavors. Some are hostile to the homeless, and merely want the problem to go away, but others are sympathetic. Occasionally they are wealthy too. Why do these jurisdictions not solve homelessness locally?
Because even if they manage to figure out the exact formula for fixing homelessness, instead of reducing the number of homeless in their locality, they increase it. Paradoxically. The homeless aren’t chained to the ground where they’re currently at… if they heard of a magical place giving out homes to the homeless, they’d go there. They’d hitchhike or panhandle for bus (trains in Europe?) fare, or if they had no other choice they’d walk for 4 weeks.
And so the small city that solves homelessness for its population of 150 homeless now has 5000.
Budgets being what they are, a city that afforded the solution for 150 can’t hope to afford the same solution for 5000. And if somehow they could, then next month they’d have another 10,000.
For that matter, nearby cities would notice too… and they’d be buying bus tickets for their own homeless.
Human beings aren’t stupid. Every politician and officeholder out there understands this intuitively. The few that don’t understand it intuitively will eventually see it in action and then come to understand it. And because of this, they refrain from doing anything that gets the homeless off the street in any significant way. So even in Democratic Party bastions on the west coast like San Francisco, you see them doing absolutely nothing to fix this. Only lip service and the “we’re pretending to be trying things” approach that we’ve had for decades.
This is a sort of “meta problem”. If you could somehow make it so that a city or a county or a small village only had to fix the problem for those homeless which are their responsibility, so that more didn’t arrive to overwhelm budgets, then at least in some places homelessness would be fixed. And the places that aren’t sympathetic might do so for practical reasons (it’s far cheaper) having seen that it can be fixed.
And it turns out that fixing this meta problem almost sounds dumb. It’s a simple administrative policy, essentially free (I mean, you can count the fractional salaries of the people who’d implement the policy, but they’re already on the payroll in most municipal governments), and ethical. It doesn’t involve shoveling the homeless into furnaces. Just some social work, paperwork, and rules that say whether or not the city is itself responsible for any particular individual (and when they’re not, the social workers are still completing paperwork that proves another city/county/whatever is actually responsible).
All those horror stories you hear about the mayor’s office buying one-way tickets and sending them out of town to anywhere else… you’ve read of them, haven’t you? When a journalist tries to call them to account on it, and they make excuses about “but he really was from this place far away, and we were just sending him home”… this policy, these rules, would give away those lies.
If there were just one city or town somewhere that was willing to adopt this policy, it might force nearby cities and towns to adopt the same policy defensively. And when they did, more might follow.
I went on a police ride along back in high school for extra class credit and the police officer told me the the neighboring city’s police force frequently takes homeless from that city and moves them to the other city lying to them in the process telling them that “the (other city) police department has all the help you need, just walk in there and they will help you.”
Thank you for your comment.
Leave them be and put up more public toilets and clean injection sites.
Ask them what they want and need. Also ask people studying this topic and people with on the ground experience like social workers what people might need.
These people who genuinely desire to remain homeless do so because for several million years it has been an effective social strategy/adaptation for primates. It’s a low percentage strategy, but one that was, until relatively modern times, a viable one.
In North America (post-colonization), you’d have the tales of mountain men who were alone for months or years at a time, only to occasionally wander into civilization. The assumption was that they were out there building log cabins (and in some cases they were), but others were just wanderers who sought out primitive shelter, or none at all. Pre-colonization likely saw similar, those who lived solitary lives away from the native civilizations and settlements.
There are more than a few European myths dating back to ancient Greece and earlier that sound eerily similar. Brutally monstrous men out by themselves somewhere, until a hero wanders through and attacks, slaying them and putting an end to their savagery. Kind of makes you wonder what the other guy’s perspective was before he took a bronze sword through his throat.
As modern civilization has expanded, there are fewer places for such people to be. We’ve sort of “encroached on their habitat”.
But evolution isn’t nearly quick enough to eliminate the personality traits that make this lifestyle appealing to some.
I’m going to assume that the vast majority of homeless people do not want to be homeless. Homelessness is a direct result of the conditions created by capitalism, and under a socialist state such conditions would mitigated to such a degree to eradicate the issue. Guaranteed food, work, and housing is how a society eradiactes homelessness.
I’ve cracked open some deeper dives into homelessness data. It’s a hard population to survey, but this at least is an area where the data is clear. You are correct. There is a small number of people who actually are homeless by choice, but it is so small that policymakers can safely ignore it. Unfortunately, the general public sometimes blows the possibility out of proportion.