Rising rents, not mental-health issues or addiction, are driving homelessness, advocates say
Rising rents, not mental-health issues or addiction, are driving homelessness, advocates say
33 comments
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I agree. Governments just don’t care (in the actionable sense) about homelessness except when it gives rise to disruptive or ‘criminal’ behavior, so they tend to associate it with those things.
TBH I think the gist of the “mental health” claim stems from the massive amount of Vietnam vets the Fed unceremoniously abandoned to the streets. To claim these people were homeless due to mental health wouldn’t be totally inaccurate, but it definitely buries the lead. More than 1 in 10 homeless people are vets in the US.
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It’s probably also a holdover from closing down asylums, with the added implication that mental health issues are both permanent and disruptive enough that attempts to house people is a losing battle so we need not try.
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Why pay to take care of mentally ill people when you can let them out, arrest and enslave them? -- Reagan probably
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Why would they care?
- The homeless don't donate to their legalized bribery PACS, and
- The oligarchs who own both parties and captured our government decades ago want significant homelessness. Sticks, like capitalism scarecrows on street corners scaring the shit out of you to keep showing up to your meaningless job to be exploited for the owner's profit, are free.
Why pay for carrots (wages, benefits, careers, basic respect) when the the threat of sticks, ie visible homelessness, is free?
There is no incentive for our nation's owners to tell their middle managers in Washington to address homelessness, and every incentive to make it worse.
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You grossly misunderstand how many of these individuals are hopelessly addicted to drugs.
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Ok?
So give them a small apartment to do their hopeless drugs in until they pass away. They're human beings mostly interested in harming themselves, which is more benevolent than the fortune 500s motivation to take as much as they can at society's expense.
You act as if insatiable greed isn't an addiction, a drug with far more potential for harm to others than something like heroin. Greed lets peope hurt others and call it "just business."
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33 comments