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LA recently finished its annual "homeless count". We'll soon find out that the city has made no progress (or worse) despite billions of dollars and hundreds of promises from city officials who have no intention of solving the homelessness problem.
A year ago I wrote this report on the city government's total fail on homelessness. dailywire.com/news/26048/vot…
There are no quick fixes to homelessness that money can solve. Because it's a social issue -- NOT an economic issue. There's one short-term solution that doesn't involve..
There are no quick fixes to homelessness that money can solve. Because it's a social issue -- NOT an economic issue. There's one short-term solution that doesn't involve..
building apartment units that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take 5-10 years and can only house a few hundred or thousands people. That short-term solution is homeless shelters. Many more homeless shelters. This has worked pretty well in NYC. At the same time...
the city/police need to not allow people to sleep on public sidewalks. But this only treats the acute symptom of homelessness. The root cause is social. It's no coincidence that chronic homelessness in America is rising as social/communal/religious bonds are fraying.
Most people who have close friends and/or relatives and/or relationships through church, synagogue, etc. would not spend one night in their car or on the streets if they ran out of money. They'd have people to turn to for help.
But when someone has no close social connections (perhaps having burned through them due to chronic drug use, as I suspect is often the case), homelessness becomes a real threat when a personal economic crisis hits. Also can't understate the negative impact of the government's
failure to appropriately deal with people who have severe mental illness and cannot take care of themselves, at least not with serious psychiatric help. If elected officials LA and California cared about solving the mental health problem, that would make a dent...
in homelessness. If they cared about reducing the suffering that's happening right now as a result of the homelessness problem, they would focus on building homeless shelters. But long-term I think the solution to homelessness in LA and around the country...
is a socio-cultural challenge and is beyond the government's ability to problem solve.
