[anadem]

It's a lot hard to re-enter society if you're separated from everyone and everyplace you know. Sure, it could be cheaper in some ways to ship the homeless out to bumfuck nowhere, but might be less cost-effective than you think, and certainly less humane.

[ty6853]

If drugs are strongly intertwined I wonder if an opportunity to voluntarily seperate from familiar drug triggers and sources might provide some balancing to the downsides.

[paul7986]

Drugs & alcohol is the majority of why they are homeless from San Francisco to Grand Junction, CO (drove through & saw they have an unofficial homeless park) to Portland to Seattle to Calgary, etc, etc.

[lazyasciiart]

No, it isn’t. If that was true you’d see a much stronger correlation between drug and alcohol use and homelessness.

[paul7986]

"A survey by the United States Conference of Mayors found that 68 percent of cities reported that substance abuse was the largest cause of homelessness for single adults."

https://endhomelessness.org/resource/opioid-abuse-and-homele...

i do not have any idea how to solve housed people turning to drugs/alcohol to try and solve internal emotional pain...maybe more & more education.

[lazyasciiart]

That’s not actually what you want to ask: Drug use is an additional risk factor for becoming homeless, which tells you that the people who are homeless are likely to be drug users - but that really just sorts out who is likely to become homeless, not how many people. If drug use caused homelessness then places with higher substance abuse rates would have higher homelessness rates. But they don’t! The rate of homelessness is driven most clearly by the difference between area income and area housing cost, and does not correlate well to any measures of drug use in the area.

A nice pair of contrasting data points here is WA and West Virginia. Drug usage and addiction, as well as mental health problems, in West Virginia far outstrips Washington - see https://www.kff.org/statedata/mental-health-and-substance-us... However homelessness in Washington is far, far worse than in West Virginia. West Virginia had almost the lowest rate of homelessness in the country.

https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2024/07/16/wv-new-data-ho...

https://247wallst.com/state/how-the-homelessness-problem-in-...

[kjkjadksj]

You do when you subset the homeless population from couch surfers and people living in their car to the people actually finding a wink of sleep under some tarps under a noisy overpass

[lazyasciiart]

No you don’t. If 50% of society uses drugs, 5% of society is homeless, and 100% of homeless people uses drugs - then you’d see that all homeless people use drugs, but most drug users are not homeless, so it’s not well correlated at all.

[zozbot234]

Then maybe the easy solution to this whole issue is to just give the homeless free cars.

[aprilthird2021]

Yes it is harder, but it's also harder for society to offer you the services like free room and board, help getting a job, and the thousand other services we offer in a high cost of living area.

Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in the most expensive place to do so.

[tomrod]

Why?

[genewitch]

Because you either make it where you grew up or we'll ship you to the Midwest where you're cheaper to deal with, ya fuckin' bum.

[tomrod]

Genuine question: is a social darwinist society something folks (perhaps you?) feel like they would survive in? Suppose your community decide it hates people who post online and wanted to ship them to Alaska. You cool with that?

[Redoubts]

Are you asking why things have costs?

[tomrod]

No, but I could see why that is where your mind started.

You have a deep, implicit assumption of a social contract in your statement here:

> Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in the most expensive place to do so.

Some people can't. I know several schizophrenia sufferers who would never be able to hit an expected checklist. Some are brilliant. Some think they talk to an esoteric God and babble prophecy. None are functional.

We used to lock those folks up in sanitoriums for their safety, but due to systemic abuse this ended. Go back further, and the folks were tribal shamans, village jesters, and other elements of society which were supported by others until their (often untimely) deaths.

The latter support more or less ended when we as a species started settling down out of nomadic lives.

As a society, we dramatically underfund infrastructure (crumbling bridges and suburbs), healthcare (exploding costs without quality improvement), education (teachers salary is uncompetitive), government action (court systems aren't expedient, legislators xna be bought).

If we don't want these things, we should have the society decide so. This would be through legislation. But we haven't. We ignore these friction instead of addressing them.

Resolving friction takes effort, and effort has costs.

[gosub100]

You have a deep implicit assumption that throwing money at the problem solves it. That's rarely true. In the case of schizophrenics, we have solved it a long time ago, but they refuse to take their meds. No amount of money in social programs will change that. It just shifts the "systemic abuse" (which I agree with you on) from (asylums abusing the ill) to the (the mentally ill abusing the general public). I think abuse is a great way to phrase it. We all get abused by the public excrement, petty crime, needles and trash, loss of use of common areas, etc. We all are being abused by that population.