> who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks
Yeah, a couple weeks and then what? Couch-surfing is a form of homelessness, and the membrane between sleeping on a couch and sleeping on the street can be very thin, especially when your health makes it unlikely you'll find work in the near future. Something as simple as a concussion can stop you from working for months.
> but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything
I hear this argument a lot, and I find it baffling. What's your proposal here? That we all wag our fingers at homeless people? The people with agency who can fix their situations on their own already did—in fact, they course-corrected long before they slid into poverty or homelessness in the first place. If they had agency, they wouldn't be in this situation.
That's why I dredged up the dead comment in the first place stating it plainly "let them sink, let them go away." At least that poster was honest about the end game.
Lot of other posters here on HN seem to feel the same way but they're rationalizing it with "well, they deserve it after all". It's their fault "because they’ve burned every bridge." It's their fault because "most people have a dozen friends". It's their fault because "substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation."
And if we don't agree with this assessment, it's we who are not serious. But left unstated is: their way just ends up leaving this vulnerable population to die, and they really don't have a problem with that, because according to them, it's their own damn fault.
I believe the latest solution to homelessness proffered in the public sphere was from Brian Kilmeade, who said "involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill 'em." A final solution if you will.
Then they need to start supporting themselves. Or at least not strew needles all over the friend’s living room and pawn their valuables to buy more meth.
Most of those friends would settle for just the latter for several months, but the worst cases 100% got kicked out of even family members’ homes for that kind of thing and that’s why they’re on the street.
10 trillion dollars of welfare, free houses, cash, whatever, is not enough to fix addicts who don’t have an insane amount of willpower. Which most people just don’t have. Drugs are mostly the problem. Most non-addicts sleep in their cars and rely on friends for a month or two and get their shit together. “Homelessness” numbers always conflate both kinds: the lost causes and the temporarily homeless.
Yeah, a couple weeks and then what? Couch-surfing is a form of homelessness, and the membrane between sleeping on a couch and sleeping on the street can be very thin, especially when your health makes it unlikely you'll find work in the near future. Something as simple as a concussion can stop you from working for months.
> but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything
I hear this argument a lot, and I find it baffling. What's your proposal here? That we all wag our fingers at homeless people? The people with agency who can fix their situations on their own already did—in fact, they course-corrected long before they slid into poverty or homelessness in the first place. If they had agency, they wouldn't be in this situation.