Political Venting

anthony said:

This is no different than the California homelessness initiatives. It's a business model, which is why homelessness has gotten worse, not better, considering the amount of money being thrown at the problem. But if they fix it, then thousands of people stop being paid, so its in their best interest to do little, get more funding, and help make homelessness worse so they can build their business model.

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That is why Finland closed their homelessness services down. The homelessness services were keeping the homelessness going.

That same meeting I spoke about in the last post, the first question asked of us was 'how to the region (it was led by representative) could improve the homelessness situation. I looked around the table. Everyone looked pretty perplexed. I raised my hand.

Build more housing.

Seems pretty obvious doesn't it?

ms spock said:

closed their homelessness services down.

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Not exactly. They didn't just close down services full stop. You would have a whole ton of dead people littering the street and that is bad for tourism tbh. What they did was convert existing shelters into - well - permant housing. for them

Voila! Crazy how complex is that?

And the revelation I made that evening? I walked in and put together it was built by a political hopefull to 'look engaged' with the community. She had never walked into the shelter. EVER. The good thing is her political aspirations were quashed.

Anyway, enough gloating.

My normal was to assign these boobs in charge some sort of 'retarded' label. How could anyone not understand that people need ID and not to be messed up on drugs in order to get their lives back on track. That evening it all came clearly into place. You couldn't make so many stupid decisions if you tried. It was so obvious!

Then it came to me that a committe I was on - paid us nothing and promised us shit they never gave us in the end - to tell them what services were of help to us. We worked for months on it and people were really passionate about it. The agency was given a 10M budget for it (I was friends with the committe chair. 10M is an awful lot of money to spend on work that 15 people are doing but not getting paid for. In the end it paid for assembly and printing of a book that they sold to people who wanted it for 10.

I will let you decide whether my area was more like the Helsinki model or the California model.

These bums needs to be held accountable.

shimmerz said:

What they did was convert existing shelters into - well - permant housing. for them

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That won't solve the US problem, which is drugs. Giving a drug addict housing won't do a thing.

Huge economic sectors in the U.S. are sustained by the drug war: law enforcement, private prisons, surveillance and security, and legal professions.

anthony said:

That won't solve the US problem, which is drugs. Giving a drug addict housing won't do a thing.

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I agree. It would be a very controversial take but I think there needs to be a mandate, In order to receive services a person needs to go to a center where there are qualified professionals to help residents dry out without dying. No safe supply. No pandering. We will help you get off drugs or you are on your own.

@Rose White , you forgot the homelssness industry. It is a massive business. Also the laundering non-profits. Pisses me off. In Canada we have to 'tell the government' if we take more than 10K out of our bank accounts to prevent money laundrering.

Twisted thieves. The lot of them. Ihope they get taken down.

shimmerz said:

That same meeting I spoke about in the last post, the first question asked of us was 'how to the region (it was led by representative) could improve the homelessness situation. I looked around the table. Everyone looked pretty perplexed. I raised my hand.

Build more housing.

Seems pretty obvious doesn't it?



Not exactly. They didn't just close down services full stop. You would have a whole ton of dead people littering the street and that is bad for tourism tbh. What they did was convert existing shelters into - well - permant housing. for them

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It is a really interesting read. They did close the "homeless" services full stop because those services perpetuated homelessness. You are correct though. They did convert some of the existing structures into permanent homes. It was a research based decision. The research showed the Fins that homelessness services kept the cycle of homelessness going.

Instead, they provided 24/7 support to all those people who they housed.

If the tenants had a problem, they could ring the helpline and if the neighbours had a problem, they could also ring the hotline, and someone could come out and deal with the situation.

There were no preconditions for obtaining housing either. The research around those outcomes is an interesting read as well.

In America, I read that providing a P.O Box, to unhoused people, actually lead to better outcomes than a lot more of the expensive options.

Interesting @ms spock . I would be interested if they housed people together or separately. We had a lot of problems here because they would stick a non-addict with heavily addicted people and that would immedicately set the chances of success at 0. Can you imagine living with a fentanyl or heroin addicts?

To me, it loops back to setting a narritive that the homeless were given all these wonderful chances but were hopeless to help.

@shimmerz I literally lived in public housing with all types of addicts for over two decades. We had not one, but two ice dealers in the next building. I had a heroin dealer two stories above me. The floor above me I had a guy who beat his wife. Two guys who raped women discussed their rapes on their veranda. We had an extremely violent man move in and women couldn't use the stairwells. A woman who gave her 4 year old to guys for a packet of cigarettes. (Reported and I rang the grant parents)

Violent sex offenders were housed there after leaving jail.

Then there were all the moderate levels of drug addiction and crime.

It totally loops back to setting a narritive that the homeless were given all these "wonderful" chances but were too hopeless to help.

Walk in, and have no contact and lock your doors and windows. I had a fence that was part of me being rehomed there. They removed that. I did not have it in writing so the drug addicts took drugs down my side.

It's a multi billion dollar industry that benefits from that narrative.

And it enables folks, who don't pay their fair share of taxes, to feel superior and never look at the systems that set so many folks up to fail.

When a car is set on fire, or horrendously violent men turn up, you don't even know that you are just surviving.

Then my father moved 10-12 blocks away and started following me in 2013.

I don't even know where my hard drive is after the Cyclone but last time I was reading up about Finland they weren't creating the situation that I lived in. They had professionals who were available 24/7 to assist in crisis. Things were dealt with immediately. They were not housed in clusters.

I organised a group of 20 plus women to complain to the Dept of Housing. And they kept lifting the bar and changing the parameters of how we had to report. We went in for meetings, which was dangerous because if any of the violent men found out, they would retaliate.

On the topic of homelessness.

I've been threathened with eviccion a few times since my twenties, and I also wanted to know 'what it was like' (to be homeless) so I decided to try 'homelessness' voluntarily for a year to see how I would fare, and I did about one year ago.

Homeless on drugs is different than homeless and not on drugs. There's a number of fairly nice youtubers who are homeless. More or less by choice, although not completely (all of them do not fit into the thing we currently call civilized). But they know HOW to be homeless. They get a tarp, they learn survival, they learn a thing or two about bushcraft. That way, you can build yourself up.

In my city there's a café where homeless people are given tea and a sandwich and they get a bit of free counseling. I don't know if that does much. But it's sure better than having every single homeless person hang out in Tent city and get stuck on drugs.

Upside Down Eagle said:

Homeless on drugs is different than homeless and not on drugs.

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Yup. 100%. Homeless not on drugs, you can get yourself back into society without too much effort, maybe a little help. Homeless on drugs, nothing is going to fix this other than rehab for drug addiction. Drugs are the problem for the person, not being homeless.

Upside Down Eagle said:

I decided to try 'homelessness' voluntarily for a year to see how I would fare, and I did about one year ago.

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Also homelessness as a choice is different from being truly homeless. Its never a true experiment if you have an "out".