Comment by bobthepanda
13 hours ago
The problem is that we’ve wound up in an unhappy place due to the weird perverse incentives of ideology. Taking homeless people off the street, whether to a hospital or jail, costs a lot of money; so we lack something to do in a climate where a good chunk of the populace is rabidly against paying more money for anything.
LA collectively spends about $3 billion on various things for homeless people, who number around 70-80,000. That’s $40,000 per person per year.
What level of spending would you like to see?
The problem is to stop spending money we need to spend some money to set up something like a mental institution.
Prison, which was being used for that purpose, costs California $127k a year https://www.lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost
Just the bed at a Californian state hospital for mental health treatment costs at minimum $150k+ a year. https://www.dsh.ca.gov/Hospitals/
And both systems are already overcapacity
I think you're right that people are against these things, but wrong about the reasons.
Taking homeless people to jail because they're homeless just seems stupid and pointless, not to mention harmful to the person going to jail.
Shelters have the issue where people don't want them near where they live (for often justifiable reasons) but obviously they have to go somewhere.
I say this because this country has a history of dismantling systems and then not paying for replacements.
We did it with state institutions, which were supposed to be replaced by community mental health centers but that never happened. And then we did it with jail overcrowding reduction, where we didn’t set up adequate recidivism reduction programs.
Before the recent pivot to tough on crime, a lot of sentencing reform was started by Republican led states, simply because jail costs a lot of money.
Don't we already have rehabilitation centers? I definitely think that you have to take homeless people being a nuisance off the streets against their will.
There's already plenty of invisible homeless people living out of a car that shower in the gym. They aren't a public nuisance and there should be structures where someone like that can get help from.
But the actual homeless problem are the drug addicts and beggars that are a public nuisance. There's no solution to that problem other than moving them against their will, is there?