City Council (Still) Mulling Over Homeless Problem

"Oh no, it was Santa that let all the people out of the institutions. Santa and his mind control ray gun that makes crazy defensive people's thoughts into reality. I see he already got you, NUG."

No need to comment.

The above level of dumba**edness speaks for itself.

"Oh no, it was Santa that let all the people out of the institutions. Santa and his mind control ray gun that makes crazy defensive people's thoughts into reality. I see he already got you, NUG."

No need to comment.

The above level of dumba**edness speaks for itself.

Oh no, it was Santa that let all the people out of the institutions. Santa and his mind control ray gun that makes crazy defensive people's thoughts into reality. I see he already got you, NUG.

"Reagan did slash budgets to those hospitals, basically forcing them to open their doors and let a bunch of people pour out who were completely incapable of living on their own. Not everything you hear from people you'd call liberals is wrong."

While there may have been budget cuts, these were by no means the only reason the mentally ill were turned out onto the streets...

"Among the most prominent critics of deinstitutionalization is E. Fuller Torrey, author of two books on the subject, who calls the effort 'a failed social experiment' which has gone 'disastrously.'

Torrey says the scheme had little to do with alleged budget cuts. 'First of all, budgets weren't cut,' Torrey tells Insight. 'They're much higher now than they were when we began deinstitutionalizing.' The biggest problem, according to Torrey, was naive - the 'increasingly fanciful idea on the part of some in the civil-rights movement that there really wasn't much wrong with these people,' leading to the idea that mental hospitals could be emptied en masse."

http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/generalresources/article10.htm

I don't hate on homeless people because I read a study one time that if you hate on homeless people you too will become homeless within 6 to 8 months.

Plus, I have my own shit to worry about.

All I know is that there are way too many bums out there. I haven't yet seen a plan to fix the problem. Seems like there are fewer bums in NYC even...

http://wttf.org/2007/03/22/broadstreetbumcom/

NUG,

Reagan did slash budgets to those hospitals, basically forcing them to open their doors and let a bunch of people pour out who were completely incapable of living on their own. Not everything you hear from people you'd call liberals is wrong.

That first post was just...silly.

And, wonder of wonders, I agree with ol' mdahmus.

It seems that we are shown over and over again that the homeless/panhandlers are out there begging for change 'cause they'd rather do that than work.

As for those that are actually mentally ill, it would seem that the movement to "desintitutionalize" them is more to blame than anything Reaganomics did.

Oh, yeah...Merry Christmas!!

Stalin kind of came up with that plan already too except it was called forced collectivization and people in the US kind of see it as a violation of human rights to stuff like ya know, liberty and shit.

You are assuming that most of the panhandlers are from the population of mentally-ill homeless (institutionalizeable, not just eccentric). Both the police and the social service agencies have long said that's not the case, and it's been confirmed by various media operations in other cities - panhandlers quite often HAVE homes; they just do better business preying on idiots in cars than they would at a real job.

That would have to be voluntary... there would just have to be enough incentive to move out there and actually work.

And it's been done before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poorhouse

Most of the homeless are mentally ill who wouldn't be out on the streets if it wasn't for the glory of Reganomics. The best way to expand a homeless situation is to give these mentally unbalanced the proper guidelines needed for living in a society. And since the Salvation Army doesn't do squat (housing the homeless from 8pm-10am only puts them out on the street roughly 10 hours a day, where they are preyed on by crack dealers and continue their cycle of indigent depression) the City, if it was serious about this, needs to pick up the slack.

My idea for a future, utopian state of homelessness is a plot of land not too far from the City, but definitely away from its center, where the indigent can work on a social farm, get daily activities by growing their own food, all the while removing themselves from the addictions of street drugs and liquor, thereby improving their quality of life to the point that they would have a decision to make: Either go back to the general society and find a job and some housing, or stay at the hospice, continue to grow their own food, and socialize and possibly council the others.

Those who are caught sleeping on the street or panhandling get shipped to this social farm until they clean up. Sure, it's kind of P.K. Dickish, but the streets would be cleaner, no jail space wasted, and definitely, no resources spent on the futile act of preaching about Jesus and G-d which the homeless and mentally ill clearly don't care enough to change their lives over.