[oooyay]

You're both sort of correct, but that also makes you both sort of wrong too.

Homeless is in part composed of three things (in Portland):

- Substance abuse (drugs, alcohol, etc)

- Mental health (coincides with the above!)

- Housing (which normally stabilizes, somewhat, both of the above!)

We lack single unit subsidized housing in Portland, which makes the former two more visible and at times problematic.

[fosk]

The elephant is the room is that drug addicts are present in large number, they cannot hold onto housing and they cause incredible damage in the cities where they congregate, to themselves and to the community.

For as long as we keep ignoring this, we are stuck in nuances.

These people don't want to get better, so we need to mandate treatment (and give them one of the many available supportive housing units after accepting treatment) or - if they refuse treatment - relocate them where they cause no harm other than themselves. Might as well call it a "government-assisted suicide" campus, because this is what it already is in every major American city nowadays. Today, we are literally letting them die on our streets.

Nobody in modern public discourse is complaining about homeless in the context of a regular Joe bad on his luck, who after a while - with dignity and hard work - goes back to a stable life. We should give our all to him and homeless like him.

[oooyay]

> they cannot hold onto housing and they cause incredible damage in the cities where they congregate

You are right, on average they cannot maintain housing, which is why I said "subsidized" - which ensures they don't become homeless (aka publicly visible).

> We lack single unit subsidized housing in Portland

What that doesn't solve is the substance abuse, which is a mental health problem. If your intent is to solve both then you need to spend on mental healthcare and subsidized single unit housing. If you just want them off the street and concentrated to certain areas (eg: where I live in Portland) then you just need subsidized housing.

[lupusreal]

There is more to being able to maintain housing than paying rent. Are you also going to subsidize cleaning and maintenance staff to scrub and rebuild the apartment every time they deliberately destroy it? If you kick them out for smearing everything in feces or tearing all the copper out of the walls or stopping up all the drains and flooding the unit because the drugs made them think this was a good idea, then you haven't solved the homeless problem. You've just made another homeless shelter which they won't stay in because it has rules they won't or can't follow.

They need to be housed in something like a prison or a psychiatric hospital, after being convicted with due process.