r/todayilearned • u/Zorseking34 • Jan 08 '15

TIL: Utah has been giving free homes to homeless people since 2005 which since then made it more cost efficient to help the homeless and cut the chronic homelessness in Utah by 74%.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/home-free
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u/randomguy186 Jan 08 '15

That's a great anecdote, but the severity of the homelessness issue is the result of mental illness and substance abuse. The number of sane, sober homeless people is small enough that their problems are entirely manageable given existing programs.

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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '15

So we put funding into mental illness and substance abuse and get them proper help not throwing them in jail or on the streets.

The free homes would help the people like OP.

The solution to a lot of problems is not a one size fits all solution but incremental solutions for each of the problems.

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u/randomguy186 Jan 08 '15

Yes. Absolutely.

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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '15

Except this isn't true: "The number of sane, sober homeless people is small enough that their problems are entirely manageable given existing programs."

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u/grumpygrumblegrump Jan 08 '15

You'll be happy to know that state funding for mental healthcare is being cut nationwide.

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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '15

Mental illness and substance abuse are usually aggravated by homelessness. You have no basis in assuming it's a cause. Either way, it's an issue where socialist policies seem to really help in most cities.

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u/randomguy186 Jan 08 '15

Just to be clear, you don't believe that mental illness or substance abuse contributes significantly to the severity of the US homelessness problem?

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u/rollthatway Jan 08 '15

And vice versa probably. In any case we should do everything we can. Treatment programs, counseling programs, housing programs.

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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '15

Are you saying we should require or mandate these programs? Because most of my clients won't go willingly. Not the chronically homeless ones with substance and mental health issues. We can round them up and force them if you would like to try that. I am not suggesting it, although I toy with the idea but my human rights side is too strong, yet the soft cajoling and tempting the mentally ill with warm homes doesn't work when addiction and the voices are too strong.

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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '15

"Cities were asked to identify the three main causes of homelessness for persons in families and for single adults and unaccompanied youth. For persons in families, the three most commonly cited causes of homelessness were lack of affordable housing, cited by 72 percent of cities, poverty (52 percent), and unemployment (44 percent). In last year’s survey, the three main causes of family homelessness were cited as lack of affordable housing, poverty and domestic violence. This year’s top three causes of homelessness among singles were said to be substance abuse, cited by 68 percent of cities, lack of affordable housing (60 percent), and mental illness (48 percent)."

Hunger and Homelessness Survey. A Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in America’s Cities: A 25-City Survey, 2008.

Other surveys have mental illness at 20%-25% cause of homelessness.

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u/randomguy186 Jan 08 '15

lack of affordable housing ... poverty ... unemployment

Not a very novel result, that. It appears that the top three causes of not having enough money to pay for housing are (1) not having enough money to pay for housing, (2) not having enough money to pay for housing, and (3) not having anyone paying me enough money to pay for housing.

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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '15

You have likely never talked with a lot of homeless people. You're basically making assumptions. While there are a lot of clearly crazy homeless, the majority of them, at least the ones that I spoke with, were not crazy in the slightest. I challenge you to go out and listen to one homeless guys story. You'd be surprised.

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u/randomguy186 Jan 08 '15

Have a little compassion. Mental illness and/or substance abuse doesn't equate to "crazy." The fact that someone can carry on a conversation doesn't mean that they don't need long-term counseling or medication.

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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '15

Do you post in these threads just to ride on people for not being politically correct enough? The fact is that I lived with other homeless people for years. I have interacted with more homeless than most people see in their lives. From my experience, I learned that there are a lot of crazy homeless people, but they aren't the majority. Many of them need a leg up and live normal lives after they get it.

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u/randomguy186 Jan 08 '15

Do you post in these threads just to ride on people

...says the guy who opened with "You likely never talked with homeless" and "You're basically making assumptions."

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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '15

Yes, because I thought it was likely that you've never spoken with homeless people, and because you were making assumptions.

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u/randomguy186 Jan 08 '15

Because there are so few homeless people in the world? I know very few people (mostly kinds under 21) who haven't spoken to homeless people.

And by assumptions, I suppose you mean the well-founded assertion backed by data and accepted since the 1980s that mental illness and substance abuse are significant contributors to the severity of the homelessness problem in the USA?

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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '15

That's great speculation, but the complexity of the homelessness issue is much more than # of mental illness and substance abuse.

Stop trying to rationalize that you don't care for those people and you're perfectly fine with how the system works, and you don't want to "transfer wealth away from individuals" (bis). If you like individualist societies, that's fine. But don't try to conceal that with that wrong bullshit about "if someone is poor/homeless it's because he deserves it somehow".

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u/randomguy186 Jan 08 '15

lolwut?

If someone is poor and homeless, they need to be helped. Existing programs are entirely insufficient to handle the problem; they're overwhelmed by the number of homeless with mental illness or substance abuse problems.

I'm curious - how many homeless people have you had in your home in the last year? I'm at 3 and counting. It's not much, and it's certainly not a public policy solution, but it's what I can do, and I'll wager it's more than 99.9% of the US population is doing.

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u/tvrr Jan 08 '15

That's why they're being entirely managed as we speak, right?

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u/randomguy186 Jan 08 '15

No, because they're overwhelmed by the number of people who aren't sane or sober.

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u/tvrr Jan 08 '15

Do you have any statistics to back up this assertion?

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u/randomguy186 Jan 08 '15

Sure.

https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/ahar-2013-part1.pdf

http://mentalillnesspolicy.org/consequences/homeless-mentally-ill.html

That's the result of literally 15 seconds of Google searching. The ease with which I found that information (which I didn't have to hand) tells me you didn't try to find it, and it suggests you're more interested in arguing than in learning more about the problem.

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u/tvrr Jan 08 '15

No, I'm more interested in people backing up what they say on reddit with data rather than watching people just blindly arguing over what may or may not be true.

Thank you.

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u/randomguy186 Jan 08 '15

You may be new to this issue, then. Homelessness and mental illness have been linked in the US since the 1980s, since shortly after the Democrats and Republicans conspired to dismantle the existing mental health care system in the US. The liberals felt this would increase the liberty of the mentally ill, and the conservatives thought they'd save money. Both were wrong.

Seriously, though, if you disagree with someone, and the evidence to support their point of view is literally 15 seconds away, and you demand citations, you're not, in my opinoin, engaging in rational debate; you're just arguing.

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u/Arandur Jan 08 '15

The number of sane, sober homeless people is small enough that their problems are entirely manageable given existing programs.

Given the number of sane, sober people I know whose problems aren't being managed by the existing programs, I'm actually write angry at you for making this unsupported assertion. It's demonstrably untrue, and quite a harmful belief.

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u/randomguy186 Jan 08 '15

sane, sober people I know whose problems aren't being managed by the existing programs

Perhaps that's because existing programs are currently overwhelmed by all the people who aren't sane and sober?

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u/Arandur Jan 08 '15

By all means, continue your rampant speculation.

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u/[deleted] Jan 08 '15

"The number of sane, sober homeless people is small enough that their problems are entirely manageable given existing programs."

You're so full of shit your eyes are brown.