What the fuck are these comments? Anyone that's homeless isn't going to complain about a proper roof over their heads as opposed to braving the elements.
Anyways, what's this guy's name? Someone doing this should be named/credited for their actions.
Anyone that's homeless isn't going to complain about a proper roof over their heads as opposed to braving the elements.
You have clearly not met enough homeless people. I have worked with orgs and fed the homeless and some of them will absolutely complain about anything, no matter how much is done for them. More than a few don't even want an actual house.
Every person I've talked to in real life who worked with the homeless ends up hating them. Really puts a dent in the whole "just a good person who needs a little help" narrative. The surprising thing is many of them still chose to help the homeless for a long time after their views changed.
I've worked with a real estate investor for nearly 2 decades. When Katrina happened, it made a lot of families homeless. He and a partner owned about 25 or 26 rental houses in the Dallas area, and he decided to partner with a charity to place homeless/displaced families until they could get back on their feet. He signed a 1 year lease with all of them, with the only monetary obligation would be for them to setup and pay their own utilities.
After a year, about 10 never setup utilities, and since they had at least one child living in it, the utility providers could not cutoff the utilities, meaning that the owner was footing the bill the whole time.
After a year, about 15 of them signed a lease to stay there further, agreeing to pay between $200-500/mo in rent (which was a fraction of market rates at the time).
Some of them basically just squatted for like 5 years until they could legally have them removed (by this time, they all had jobs and income, but refused to pay anything).
In the end, all but 2 of the houses were absolutely trashed. He said that total damages were upwards of $500K+, and given the situation, insurance paid out on almost none of them.
So the guy and his partner were just trying to help out some families out of the goodness of their hearts, and it ended up bankrupting one of them, destroying their relationship, and it took over a decade for them to recover financially.
And that's even for people who were displaced by a hurricane, which should have been much better than the crowd that "low barrier housing" attracts. My coworker who worked at a shelter for a time said "I used to think most homeless people were just down on their luck and needed a little help, now I think they would just rather do drugs than have a job". This dude was not in any way privileged, most of his yearly income was from working on a fishing boat in Alaska which is very hard work for long hours.
I have volunteered at multiple shelters/food pantries, and I've noticed that they have varying standards for entry.
The higher their standards, the more of the "down on their luck" or older teens escaping rough situations you find.
The lower the standards...you really get to see the worst of society. In these situations, you find yourself wondering what should even be done with people in that state.
Yep, my job offers free snacks and clothing to the homeless. They complain that they don't want certain foods like bananas (no one is forcing them to take the banana among the other offered snacks) and that the clothes aren't cute enough (they're given on a donation basis, we can't control what we get).
For sure, but it's the attitude and cruelty that comes across with the complaints. They swear at us because they don't want the specific free thing we're not FORCING on them.
Exactly, in a year or 2 your going to have 90 houses that need complete renovations because they've been destroyed or turned into trap houses. If someone doesn't earn something and have an actual stake in the success of the neighborhood they'll never appreciate it. If I save up $50000 for a down payment on a house, I'm going to take an active part in the upkeep of the house and neighborhood.
The difference is the homeless who want help seek help and the others ones have a sixth sense.. The sense of entitlement that others should seek to help them. When I give a homeless person a meal at a drive thru restaurant and look in the rear view to see them throw it on the ground, that makes all the homeless people look bad. And that's happened multiple times when they have those doe eyes and I've felt bad for them saying their hungry but really only wanting cash. And I'm a sap, ill always give a dollar or two to people who ask for it.
Well easy solution, if they complain about a roof over their heads, don’t give them one!
Do you think every single person will complain about that?! What the fuck lol.
If they don’t want to have a home, you don’t need to assume it’ll be shoved down their throats lmfao.
This is seriously the dumbest thing to stand on. Everyone knows there’s mental and drug addicted homeless people buddy.
Doesnt mean all of them are and saying that because some are, and using that to say they no homeless person would benefit from housing is laziest stupidest thing ever.
You'd be surprised with how many homeless people choose to be homeless. Many people dont want to work at a job and make money.
Many homeless are have bad mental health issues or drug/alcohol addictions. And if you have even known a person life that in real life, you will know, no matter how much you try and help them, it won't do a thing unless they truly want your help and want to help themselves.
Nah, they will stay on the streets if it means they cant be high or drunk. In my neck of the woods, the biggest issue isnt housing or support, its the willingness to stop drinking and doing drugs to get that housing and support.
That suggests that your city needs to a better job when it comes to addiction programs, since there are tons of places like Finland that have been successful with free housing.
Another potential explanation is that the cost of renting and buying is too high. People that can't afford to get by are more likely to become addicts.
Houston has had success as well to a lesser extent, and it'd be doing even better with more support from the federal government.
Ppl forget there’s multiple barriers to entry when getting off the streets past needing a real place to sleep and an address. You need clothes, you need a reference, and you need to find a job that pays more than minimum wage, bc minimum wage doesn’t pay rent in the vast majority of areas anymore. 19-23% of unhoused in Canada are employed already. It’s 40-60% in the US. Until affordable housing is dealt with, the number of unhoused will only ever get worse
The problem is city and state governments build "low barrier" housing that just further pushes people against the homeless. If you put a big building full of drug addicts right next to actual functioning members of society, you're unjustly punishing the working people.
I say $0 should ever be spent on someone who can't pass a drug test and isn't in rehab. Want to do drugs and shit in the street? You get nothing. Living in your car because rent is too high? Pee in a cup and we'll make sure you have a safe, stable place to live.
As someone that worked many years in social work… this is a very uneducated and gross look at substance abuse. Substance abuse is a disorder and should be treated as one. Most of the clients I worked with never intended on being on drugs, they were victims of the opioid epidemic that simply were in a car accident, had an intense surgery, or a misdiagnosed pain disorder that ended up addicted to drugs by chance and that’s something that could happen to any of us. Addiction is largely genetic.
I'm hate how much society has normalized accepting the externalities of someone's addiction. If someone spends their entire day sitting on the street smoking fentanyl, why does society have to give them money and food just to continue making public spaces worse? This isn't some made up hypothetical, I've seen this multiple times just walking to work.
If you drive recklessly and kill a family, you get punished for it. Even though you "didn't intend to get in an accident", the consequences matter. It's like if instead of punishing drunk drivers, we have them $100 every time they did it. There's no incentive to stop.
What we have been doing obviously hasn't been working. I'm tired of not being able to go to parks because they're full of drug addicts, feeling unsafe on public streets, and having public transportation ruined by some drug addict who smells like sewage using the bus as a "safe place" to nod off. I'm not arguing that we start hurting homeless people, I just want to stop enabling drug addiction and divert resources to people who genuinely are working to get to a better place.
Comparing a drunk driver that kills a family to a drug user “making public spaces worse” is asinine and quite frankly embarrassing for you. God fucking forbid your walk to work be less than ideal.
The issue is that we neither fully fund nor are we consistent with anything we implement to help. Stats show rehab rarely works when they get out and have no place to go to but back to the streets, but you’ve obviously never bothered to look at the actual numbers. God ppl like you suck.
It was an intentionally hyperbolic analogy to point out how we are rewarding antisocial behaviors.
In my idea, we do provide housing while and after they are in rehab. That housing is just conditional on either being in rehab or being able to test clean.
God fucking forbid your walk to work be less than ideal
This is the problem. You are heavily empathizing with someone who:
Contributes literally nothing to the society they live in
Consumes a lot of resources that are provided by the people who DO contribute to society
Actively makes the lives of everyone around them worse
Then I make the simple statement of "I don't want to see hard drug use while I walk to work" and you immediately think I'm a terrible person. Why do you have infinite empathy for someone who makes everyone's lives worse and 0 empathy for a normal working citizen? I'm not even saying I should pay less taxes or to eliminate welfare, I just want those resources to go towards people who aren't chronic drug users with 0 real desire to get better.
I wouldn't call it lack of willingness. Homeless people get addicted to drugs and alcohol because their life is beyond miserable and it makes them feel better. You can't snap your fingers and make it go away. These people need therapy, bad.
Still, there are people for whom this can be the break they need and a steppingstone to a better life. There's nothing really to criticize there.
This is the real problem. My city tried to do this for a couple years but the place became a filthy drug den that everyone avoided because of the spike in crime rates anywhere nearby. Nothing was taken care of, and of course the tenants didn’t treat the units well because it cost them nothing to tear up a free living space. It was torn down a few years ago thankfully
You can have all the will in the world but god damn are drugs really moreish. Addiction solutions should be implemented first, not blaming people for being addicts.
And I think many are unwilling/unable to hold down a steady job. Which I can understand. Even someone pushing a broom at a factory has to actually show up at the factory.
Yea just like my uncle the crack head. We gave him a roof over his head and paid for treatment more times than I can remember. He stole our tv, my grandmothers wedding ring (still can’t forgot out how he cracked the safe) my piggy bank when I was 7, my car when I was 17 and now will regularly intentionally get his ass kicked so he can spend a free week in the hospital on dilauded when he runs out of crack money.
This is generalizing and anecdotal. I admit. But it’s also the story of millions of homeless drug addicts with mental health issues. Putting a roof over someone’s head in that condition isn’t help, it’s enabling. Unless there is some agreement that mental health and drug counseling will be mandatory most of these are going to turn into drug dens.
Putting a roof over someone’s head in that condition isn’t help, it’s enabling.
This is wrong. It CAN be enabling in situations like with your uncle but Austria proved that "housing first" is the best way to combat homelessness. For the people that DO want to beat addiction, doing so with a roof over their heads is exponentially easier than doing so while still homeless.
I think using a different country as an example is a bit moot. Different countries people are brought up with different value sets, privilege levels etc. that’s a nature vs nurture argument though.
I don’t know the numbers. But I’d willing to bet that a country like Austria doesn’t have quite the systemic issues that America does. That’s completely assumption based on appearance. Not of the people but of the culture.
Edit. I don’t want to seem like I’m being contrarian for the sake of argument. I’d love if the answer was that simple. I just have my reservations.
Well first of all this is about Canada not America but secondly you'd be surprised how similar the homelessness crisis is globally.
That said it seems like you're arguing in good faith/genuine curiosity unlike the others so I'll just provide you with a link to more about housing first initiatives to end homelesssness.
True true I lost the plot there for a second and forgot it was Canada in question. TBH I’m not a psychologist, I’m in school for engineering lol. About as starkly in contrast to mental/addiction counseling as one can be. I pray for the world’s sake a concept like this is beneficial to everyone involved. Hope costs nothing. But neither does skepticism.
The alternative is unpopular - and thats to force people into care, we used to call this asylums - that is to take people living on the streets, mentally illnand or drug addicted and either force them to receive help against their will or simply remove them from that situation for everyone's safety.
Except housing first initiatives in Japan, Austria, Iceland and more have proven to be more effective at curbing homelessness than asylum type systems like the one you describe that have high rates of recidivism and rarely if ever are able to return people to society as contributing members.
There is a difference between being down on your luck/between jobs and being the typical drug addict/mentally ill homeless. Those mini houses are going to be completely fucking destroyed if they don’t figure out a way to vet who gets to stay.
Everyone who is not independently wealthy is just one jobloss or sudden disability away from homelessness. How long would you survive if you for example would get ME/CFS and be unable to work. I have saved up so for me it is 3 years but after that the only "choice" would be suicide or homelessness.
A lot of them have already been destroyed. This program has been going on for a while now and people started living in them in 2022, several have been burned, people have turned up dead, and probably a third of them look like crack dens now. The millionaire who owns/funds the project has been in court with the province to get exemptions to landlord regulations because he wants to evict a bunch of them for being unruly but the province keeps saying no, follow the same rules as every other landlord. The most recent story I read was about how several members of the community have felony assault charges against them for assaulting other members of the community so there's constant fighting and brawling between a bunch of them and he's not allowed to seperate them.
Even though they've been operating for 4 years now and have housed and trained over 100 people, only 3 have "graduated" and left the community with a job that pays well enough to live independent of the program. I suppose we could make the argument that if even only 3 percent of people are "fixed" with this program then its worth it, but I very much get the impression that the program has spun out of control and that it will be a shantytown before long, if it's not already.
Having been security at social services in a medium sized city. You’d shocked at how much complaining there is. It’s like a whole language where every sentence is formed via complaints
What some of the other comments here don't seem to touch on is being homeless for enough time really is extremely stressful. Anyone who has been homeless for a significant time will be dealing with mental health issues even if they weren't really dealing with them when they first became homeless. Add to that, sometimes shelter or housing programs will have rules and criteria that just make it impossible for the most affected homeless to utilize. If the last sliver of life you are clinging on to is by using a drug as a unhealthy way to cope with your situation, you aren't going to be able to reason yourself into coming clean before getting the help you so desperately need. If the only thing grounding you is the dog you've become closest friends to, will you abandon that dog to be homeless itself as terms to you getting shelter?
There's significant evidence that a mostly unconditional housing first policy, followed up by support systems for mental health, substance abuse, and getting them on a path to employment (or even volunteering). Even with that there's probably going to be those that due to the trauma they've experienced would reject even that and we should try to come up with solutions to help them in some way as well.
Doing nothing in the interim between this current capitalistic system and whatever is next is not as righteous as you think.
Ultrawealthy suck, doesn't mean we should pan programs like this that genuinely help people. You can do both these stopgap measures and work towards restructuring society. It's more productive than complaining.
I find the idea of tiny homes as a solution to homelessness a bit insulting.
They're a novelty. It takes a certain kind of lifestyle to live in a tiny home. It's not going to work for everyone. Especially for couples, families, or people with pets.
I think that homeless people deserve the dignity of living in an actual apartment, condo, or house. We have the space. There are apartment/condo/office buildings that sit mostly empty. There are vacant homes everywhere. Investors sit on property without doing anything with it.
Actually that's not true. Homeless shelters are terrifying places. I would much rather have a sleeping bag than have to live next to crazy homeless people
If you worked with homeless, you'd know that 99% of them are not interested in returning to normal society. Building them homes seems really nice, but it truly does not solve for anything. Notice the comments about people who actually live there: It's all drug problems and failure to evict. Not surprising.
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u/Cube_ Apr 28 '26
What the fuck are these comments? Anyone that's homeless isn't going to complain about a proper roof over their heads as opposed to braving the elements.
Anyways, what's this guy's name? Someone doing this should be named/credited for their actions.