this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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Are you honestly unaware of the concepts of people who chose to be homeless? It's a pretty documented thing. It has to do with their unwillingness or inability to keep a regular life and schedule,etc. lots of sources out there on Google. Go downtown in any major city, you'll find plenty of homeless people who refuse shelters and help.
It's not so much that they refuse shelters and help, it's that the help comes with strings that, for various reasons, they can't deal with.
Sometimes it's not being allowed to bring posessions, or to sleep separate from your spouse, but most of the time it's drugs. Many shelters won't let you use, or won't let you be in the shelter if you're obviously tweaking, and certainly won't let you deal. This isn't really a bad thing: it's a serious safety issue to have someone out of their mind and/or around open flame and/or getting into fights.
So the homeless who can't give up their addiction stay on the street, or in tents, or squatting.
The real problem is drugs. The real solution is to make drugs free, legal and only available in treatment facilities. Want to get high? Go to the facility. Want to get high but don't want to go for treatment for various reasons (mental illness, psychosis and/or "I just wanna have a good time"). Nope, sorry.
Try to skirt the law? Involuntary-but-humane incarceration.
Plus, making drugs free pretty much cuts petty crime off at the knees. It hurts organized crime, too.
Feel free to provide some of said documentation.
As someone who lives near the Allan Gardens encampment in Toronto, if you walk past it late at night you see all these flickers of light through the tent fabric - like little fireflies. It's meth pipes. They are lighting up meth pipes.
As proof, here is a statement from the very frustrated hard-left aligned councillor in my ward about the homeless encampment. Yes many people take the help, but yes many people choose to be homeless.
Again, so we let them all freeze to death because some might choose to be homeless? This is a nonsensical argument. We don't remove seatbelt laws because some people don't wear them.
I live in Vancouver, I've been near the DTES my entire life, and have worked in the area repeatedly. I know how bad it is.
I'd love a single person here to explain how not helping these people survive the winter is going to be a positive thing. All these people are asking is to not kick them out of encampments until they won't die of fucking exposure. If we don't have the housing for them, what the fuck else are they supposed to do?
Nothing has made me less proud to be from here than the reactions I read to people who are homeless. Just gross.
Google it, I'm not your servant
Ok it's made up, got it.
Just watch any imterview with a shelter advocate they will tell you that there is a percentage of homeless yhat will either refuse shelter or leave soon afterward. The reasons can be mental health related, barrier entry, or a personailty that just doesn't follow rules like after x:pm it is quiet time.
Yeah, 'there's a percentage' of any group that won't accept help. The idea we just don't do something because some of the people won't accept help is insane. We'd literally never do anything ever. I was responding to:
Yeah half is wrong, it's a margin.
Lol what a little fragile world view you have that when confronted with a hurdle in the homeless population, you simply ignore it and say it doesn't exist while plugging your ears.
I didn't say it didn't exist, I took your quote just shrugging off doing anything because 'half' (lol) of people won't accept help, and said "Hey what if we didn't throw all of them out to die if some of them don't want help."
What a sad, self-centred view you have, where you can just plug your ears to people begging for help because you can demonize some of them.
Fantastic to hear from the NIMBY crowd though, sorry you have to suffer watching others suffer in your view sometimes.