This is a scapegoat at best in areas with high homelessness. The mentally ill and drug abusers are the most visible part of the homeless population not all the homeless population. There are also complex relations to cause vs effect where mental illness may be at manageable levels until a crisis like homelessness exacerbates it or drug use may be a result of being homeless instead of a cause.

The mentally ill and drug abusers are also the ones who need to be dealt with in a way totally separate from those who are struggling but trying to get back on their feet and need a place to shower and sleep safely.

They cause disproportionate damage to cities and the cause of aiding homeless itself. It's asinine to conflate the two issues and waffle back and forth between "more houses" and nimby name-calling. Neither will help.

We should have 21st century asylums and more houses. I won't accept a false choice, we can do both. (I'd argue we also need subsidized job relocation programs so people don't get stuck in high CoL areas looking for minimum wage jobs. There are very affordable areas to live in USA that want workers, let's make this market more efficient).

You're stuck in a false dichotomy. There's nothing wrong with adopting all the housing reform you want. But we also (additionally not instead of) need something immediate to treat the acute, highly localized problem of mentally ill and drug abuse in encampments. If in fact you have not been to one (e.g. Venice Beach a few years ago) and seen the enormous encampments and destruction they inflict on nearby property, it's hard to understand. Maybe you have?

This isn't about American exceptionalism, because either A) other countries don't have this problem (great!) or B) they do and all the "do it like they do" was just proven wrong as a solution to both the problems or C) they did have this problem and it was solved by these policies - great! The immediate intervention of getting the worst offenders off the street is a temporary solution and housing policy wins long term.

But no matter what there's no reason to push back on two heterogenous solutions because it includes more than just your favorite one.

I don't think it's fair to equate this problem with just "the poor", and it's certainly not fair to equate "the poor" with homeless, mentally ill, drug abusers, or serial offenders. Those are the folks I'm referring to, not "the poor" as a general economic class. That should be obvious.

It's most certainly not fair to equate the homeless with "serial offenders". Most homeless people are simply poor. Most of the middle class are "drug abusers".

But whatever you gotta tell yourself to excuse the mistreatment.

I believe you have never been to or around the situation I'm talking about. That's ok, but let me assure you it's a very very small minority of drug users and homeless. Nobody is proposing anything for those two large groups. Just a few very bad locations that get overlooked because of these kinds of misunderstandings which absolutely do need something different.

You think mentally ill do not need a place to shower and sleep safely? And what do you think the lack of place to shower and sleep safely does with already mentally ill person?

Like common, this does not passes the smell test. When housing is cheap, mentally ill can pay housing and have easier time getting support to get that housing. Their mental health issue do not escalate so quickly due to lack of sleep and constant danger.

> You think mentally ill do not need a place to shower and sleep safely?

Giving a locking door to an addict is a death sentence. As countless experiments have proven, unsupervised shelters all over California have been literally destroyed by addicts and the mentally unwell. I'm talking faeces on the walls, blood and urine everywhere, horrific attacks in the units, and eventually the place just gets burnt down. So these people need supervised shelter. In a facility. Where they're prevented from harming others and themselves. De-institutionalisation was a huge mistake. There were abuses and they needed reform, but throwing schizophrenics and addicts into the street was not kind or humane, and leaving them there is just as immoral.

It's almost like there needs to be something between locking them up against their will, and just ignoring them entirely.

Weird.

There is such a gulf between the idealized treatment for an ideal downtrodden patient and the reality of a severely mentally ill person (especially with drugs involved).

Not every homeless person has mental health issues. And most probably those with mental health issues _because_ they are homeless.

Rounding all the homeless up into an asylum is just sweeping the problem under the carpet.

Asylums, historically, were just a way to jail more "undesirables" in a way that isn't legally a jail. Some definitely started with good intentions, but they all tend to morph into jails.

We need something in the middle. The ability to be a functional adult is forced into being a binary thing. You either succeed, or you crash and burn down into being homeless, institutionalized, etc.

There really aren't many ways to meet halfway - to have living spaces where you can live up to your abilities and have safety nets for the areas where you struggle. We have "halfway houses" to help people re-enter society after crashing, but not much to catch people before they fall.

(We do have some programs that try to help, but they are swamped, or inefficient, either expensive or under-funded, or some combination of those things. )

West Virginia is literally the demonstration that this sentiment is completely wrong. They have a higher drug abuse rate than California, but effectively do not have homelessness at any rate that we do… because you can get a place to live for very, very little money.

It is very obvious that the housing availability is a major factor.

Kind of a pointless stance when trying to build that support infrastructure walks you into the same NIMBY-wall.

For some people, a kind of assisted living is available - independent apartments, but with a social worker visiting once a week or a few times a week if necessary.

Of course, who will pay for it? There's plenty of money but it's all in corporations and shareholders.

I don't think housing will hurt the people with mental health issues and addiction problems.

Being homeless makes peoples mental health issues massively worst then whatever there was before. So yes, housing actually helps people with mental health issues.

And yes, as housing becomes less available, people with mental health issues are among the worst affected.