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The major issue in homelessness is not the lack of housing. It's the refusal of society to say no. No, you can't camp in this city. No, you can't shit in the streets. No, you can't panhandle aggressively. No, you can't shoot up publicly and leave your used needles lying around. The fact that we are not going to allow you to destroy our city by doing these things is not our problem. It's your problem. You can solve your problem by not doing drugs, getting help for your mental problems, getting a job, and sharing rent with others so inclined until you can afford a place of your own, probably in a lower cost community. This is not going to happen because the people we have elected allow the homeless to wallow in their victimhood rather than accept personal responsibility for their self destructiveness.

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That's very true, but there's many forms. A lot of the homeless people I see are so mentally ill that they don't know where they are. These people are talking to inanimate object, then there's the ones who are choosing drugs instead of a home, then there's the one who want to be homeless, they like making their own rules, and still there's some who just hit a rough patch and will be out of it soon, they just have to not give up, but what I've noticed is the ones who don't know where they are didn't start that way. The longer they stay on the streets, the less mentally competent they become. I think a lot of them just accept it because it's what they are used to, and it's easier than getting out there and getting out of the streets. Also, it seems the ones who do get off the streets are never the same as they were before, there's something about being in the streets that starts to erode your mental faculties, it's very strange. Like how a cat or a pig becomes feral.

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Jordan: Thanks for your response. You obviously know much more about the issue than my rather simplistic view. I do believe that we did a disservice to the mentally ill when we closed rather than reform our old mental institutions. Many of the homeless probably should be in humane custodial care than left to die in the streets.

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Thank you for commenting. Your view isn't simplistic, it's absolutely true, until the people are too far gone. Then someone really needs to step in and get these people off the streets, they become a danger to themselves and others. Because they start out just in a rut and then they start to erode until they're too far gone, what they really need is to feel like things could get better but they don't see it so they don't believe it. If they get them off the streets things WILL get better for them, they just need a few wins under their belt so they believe things can get better. Joe Rogan has this bit that he says every few podcasts, he's said it so many times and I really love it, "If you wanna 'Make America Great Again' make less losers. How do you make less losers? Maybe take some of those billions your sending to other countries to fuel murder and put into these inner cities that have been terribly desolate and plagued by homelessness forever, like south side of Chicago, Baltimore, Memphis" give these people growing up in these terrible places a better chance, maybe there will be less gangs, less violence, less losers. They created this problem, after all. Like you said, closing those mental institutions for the sake of progress was the biggest psyop in history. Michael Shellenberger write an excellent book on this called San FranSicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, where he not only told that story but offered solutions based on real time data and other countries that were really good on this issue.

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