"If the poor and uneducated knew how to work the system, they'd be neither poor nor uneducated."
-- John & Ken
The problem with homelessness is almost exactly like the problem with joblessness. There are people who simply cannot find a place in our society, and do not have the skills to survive in a way that makes us adequately comfortable with our urban sophistication. So like with joblessness, we need to find a way to recover the recoverable, so that they do not slip inevitably into the abyss with no hope for a second chance. We also need to make clear distinctions between the deserving and undeserving and direct them in the proper directions.
The short , sweet and inadequate answer to the problem of urban homelessness is rural survival for the non-indigent and rural institutionalization for the indigent. To leave homeless people in the city is to set them up to be victims of criminal predators. Urban homelessness is a blight on our civilization. I must confess that on the rural angle of things half of me is saying 'out of sight out of mind', but the important fact is that it's cheaper to live in the boonies and lower skillsets are required. It makes no sense to me to put homeless people up on expensive property in a highly competitive environment, unless they are ready for it. The readiness sniff test, it seems to me, would be whether or not they are likely to do well in a halfway house of some sort.
But before we go dropping people into boxes, remember the reason why we must. The state has an interest, ie the People have an interest in keeping homelessness down. And by definition, these are people who can't or won't handle their business. Mind you, this is below the welfare line, so we may as well call them unemployable for the most part. It also seems to me that a substantial number of these folks are on the margins of institutionalization, meaning mental homes, halfway houses, VA hospitals or jails. So depending on how you look at it, some fraction of the homeless should be under some kind of assisted living. But there have got to be limits to how much assistance the state should give, just as there are limits in the amount of unemployment checks people out of work should get. Nobody who can compete has a right to not compete.
So let's do this four ways. A magic quadrant should suffice. Two axes, recoverability, and sociability. On the axis of recoverability, there are the Mobile and the Immobile. On the axis of sociability there are the Beat Down and the Low Down. I don't know how the demographics play out in this, obviously I'm being somewhat arbitrary in the way I split things up. But again, I think it's important to insure that those who will be on the dole are there out of necessity. This gets back to questions of the Underclass and who is socially indigent vs who is truly indigent. I don't want the socially indigent clotting up my welfare system. For the purposes of discussion, I'd say the answer is about half. Which is to say my SWAG is that half of the people who live in the street are truly indigent. There are a great number of questions to address in this. But my presumption is that the person that we want to take care of is the man who cannot work, not the man who will not work.
There's got to be a special place in the plan for indigent women and children, the mentally retarded and the crippled. There have got to be exceptions for people who have other pensions and other family. I don't buy the notion that everybody deserves a nuclear family and that ought to be the model. If you can't make it on your own, then you don't deserve privacy.
So that's where I'm coming from on homelessness. Keep them away from people who will do them dirt, classify them according to some index of recoverability and sociability. By Mobile and Immobile, I mean are they ill / lame or otherwise physically or mentally incapacitated. By Beat Down vs Low Down I mean are they the victims of some tragic event or are they simply massive underachievers?
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