So fucking sick of people like this. They genuinely believe that every single homeless person in America is a hyper-visible, unmedicated schizophrenic who’s too mentally ill to want to get off the street. Never mind that the vast majority are members of the working poor and live in cars, friends’ places and transitional housing—doesn’t get more invisible than that.
Universal housing would effectively solve the homelessness crisis and every counterargument is actually a supporting one if you have half more than half of a braincell. Yes, a lot of homeless people need additional (i.e. psychiatric) help, BUT THEY ALSO NEED HOUSING because poverty literally exacerbates mental illness. Yes, libraries shouldn’t be treated as homeless shelters, which is WHY HOMELESS PEOPLE NEED HOUSING. Yes, a lot of people who’re forced to live in squalor on a literal street corner smell, which is why THEY NEED HOUSING so they can have basic dignity and access to a shower.
Even if you fucking hate the homeless, you should support housing for them, because then they would just be home.
A lot of people imagine that housing and government services are available and that people are choosing to be homeless. Many middle class people are under the impression there is some kind of 1950s style welfare state that still exists for the poor and is simply overwhelmed by people that refuse to help themselves. It’s incredible the kind of roads that denial and ego-defence can lead down. I mean this is why Mao tried to do a cultural revolution- because some people just cannot learn except through personal experience.
roughly 50% of leftists are social workers who start their first job and realize that they have no services to provide and are basically just shuffling people in crisis between 20 different punitive and un-funded non-profits while they wait for someone to die so they can get into public housing.
No-one wants to understand that homelessness is an intended product of the economic system. Just as neoliberalism demands unemployment and a pool of reserve labour to keep wages down, so too those at the bottom of society have to be punished with special cruelty as a warning to everyone else. I would imagine it is mostly middle class types absolutely blinded by ideology that hate the homeless.
