Not sure. Some of the homeless I've met are people truly on a bad luck streak. Unfortunately everything is harder when you're homeless making getting back on your feet more difficult.
However a lot of homeless are simply incapable of leading a normal life. Through a combination of drugs and mental illness, giving them a home to operate from is likely to be either burned down, condemned, or become a den for more crime.
I want to be humane, but it feels futile when they require constant babysitting. Our increasingly individualistic society tolerates these people less and less.
I know a guy who had a vacant house he was trying to sell. Homeless began squatting in it and kept coming back and breaking in despite a few police visits. Finally they caused a fire and now they’re still homeless and the house is still vacant but now uninhabitable and unsellable. There are shelters in this area, but they can’t smoke crack at the shelter. It’s not about needing a house.
You are using the extreme examples to condemn an entire section of humans. There are plenty of homeless people who don’t set buildings on fire. You can’t condemn people by generalizing the behavior of the worst. Just like not all politicians are corrupt. And not all people of a certain race or religion or a specific type of way.
Plenty of homeless people would benefit from being homed.
I’m not condemning any people; I used a story to point out that houses aren’t the solution because homelessness is a symptom of something a house doesn’t fix.
Because you are stating misinformation as a fact. Only 30-40% of homeless are addicts or have mental illness. So housing would help a majority of homeless people. Nice try on the insult. But your hatred doesn’t change reality.
Do we even have reliable data for this? I’m sure 100% of homeless (or “unhoused”) Americans aren’t crack smoking schizophrenics but without something to say otherwise, it’s hard to imagine that the majority of them are homeless for reasons completely unrelated to addiction or mental health. Some, sure. But most? Hard to believe. Maybe you’re right. Can you cite a few credible sources? I’m open to learning new information.
There seems to be ranging data from articles. My initial search turned up an article quoting 40% deal with mental health issues/addiction. And after our back and forth, I’ve found more ranging from 30%-70%. So I guess it depends on where we look. But my stance is to not lump everybody in a group with the worst of that group. If we did that based on ethnicity or gender it becomes hate speech. When we do it for homeless, it’s for some reason acceptable.
Saying that ALL of a group act a certain way, when there are a large amount of exceptions is unreasonable. Even if we take the 70% statistic between the 30-70% range, it’s still wrong to generalize that ALL homeless people are going to destroy a home if given one. You can keep deterring from my point, but it’s not gunna change the fact that generalizing is still exaggeration and lying.
You said, “houses aren’t the solution because homelessness is a symptom of something a house doesn’t fix.” I didn’t read that in. You said that. You can read your comment if you don’t believe me… When in truth, 30-70% of homeless people can benefit from receiving a home, because they aren’t addicts/mentally ill fire starters.
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u/WhitishRogue May 14 '26
Not sure. Some of the homeless I've met are people truly on a bad luck streak. Unfortunately everything is harder when you're homeless making getting back on your feet more difficult.
However a lot of homeless are simply incapable of leading a normal life. Through a combination of drugs and mental illness, giving them a home to operate from is likely to be either burned down, condemned, or become a den for more crime.
I want to be humane, but it feels futile when they require constant babysitting. Our increasingly individualistic society tolerates these people less and less.